Wednesday, December 5, 2007

Thing 1 - What are we talking about?

Information literacy is huge. I am currently on the LA curriculum review committee and we are looking at bringing our department's standards into the 21st century. I think on of the key pieces of this initiative is Information Literacy. Our students (and many of us too) are bombarded with information on a daily basis. It can be downright overwhelming!! We need to prepare our students to discern what is pertinent information and then figure out what it means for their lives. However, I also believe that it is not necessarily telling the kids how to find good information, because that changes rapidly: there is always a new website or search engine. Instead, it is teaching them how to be consumers of information and how to judge the information for themselves, and that is the hardest part for me as a teacher. It is easy for me to go to the media center and tell them to only go to one website (the one I have predetermined as 'good') and it is a ton harder to actually teach them why it is good and how to judge if others are 'good' too.

I am excited to learn more about tools and better practices for research!

No comments: