Internet search like a pro - a lesson

Google Search Engine by Simon Steinberger

Back when I first got a notebook cart (yes, that tells you how long ago it was), I used to explicitly teach my students how to perform Google searches. It was one of the very first lessons I taught at the start of each year, and it always came complete with a cheat sheet that my students religiously pasted to the back of their notebooks. I do not remember when I stopped teaching it, but I do know it was not a conscious decision. It could have been that it simply was forgotten as I was putting things on my beginning of year calendar, or maybe it was the year when the school went 1:1 and IT was in charge of introducing the use of chromebooks to all classes. The reason really does not matter, what does matter is that I moved on, perhaps under the assumption that since my students are digital natives and they live in a world where they are used to finding YouTube videos to DIY everything, the lesson had become irrelevant.

However, I was recently watching a group of students stumble and get frustrated as they performed a simple Google search for a Genius Hour project. When I approached them and said, "Just exclude the terms you don't need", they looked at me as if I was speaking in tongues and it dawned on me that not only had I not taught them to be effective searchers, nobody had! My students had all been intuitively finding shortcuts and relying on each other to learn them, which although very cool in demonstrating some problem solving and collaboration skills, was probably not as effective as it could be.

With that in mind, I did a deep dive of my drive to find those old resources and updated some to include them in the activity shared below. The plan is for students to make a copy of the presentation (assign it through Google classroom), and have them work through it practicing the skills so that in the end they will have a handy reference that they can then use to remind themselves if all the different "how-tos" when needed.

I know that there are many effective search tips that are not included, but I think it's a good place to start. 

What do you think, are there some other lessons that you may have forgotten to teach and that are just waiting to be re-discovered? I invite you to share them in the comment section.

Digital Citizenship for Educators - KQED Teach

Pixabay via Pexels 

Over the last several years educators have worked hard to increase their use of media in the classroom. We have witnessed how students continue to grow their online presence and many different outlets have encouraged us to seek out lessons to teach our students how to be active participants in this environment. If you are like me, you have scoured Common Sense Media and their wonderful toolkits and developed many different digital citizenship lesson sequences to guide your students, using a wide variety of platforms. As you have developed these lessons, you have been learning alongside your students many of the ins and outs of what is appropriate, how to stay safe, etc. You have probably also participated in district-mandated training and even sought out your own professional development in order to stay current with the exponential growth in legislation surrounding student privacy.

Your own depth of knowledge on the subject of digital citizenship comes into play every time you decide what you are going to have your students do to demonstrate mastery in your content area. Your students, as well as most parents, rely on teachers to help them navigate new platforms and tools while staying safe and current in the ever-changing online world. At this point in the summer, you are probably starting to think about what you can reuse, what you can tweak and what to completely overhaul in your lessons to address "fake news", evaluating information and giving proper attribution to content your students may want to use this coming school year.  Some of your tried and true plans may suffer from the disappearance of the specific tools you were using, or you may simply want to strengthen your own knowledge in order to be better prepared to address these topics, but where can you find easy to follow professional development that can help you uncover your own blind-spots?

For me, the answer came in the form of KQEDTeach. I've written about them before, but what you may not know is that not only are they free, but they have recently added several new courses specifically addressing digital citizenship. Each of the courses follows a learn-make-teach cycle, where you are not only given the tools and practice each skill yourself, but you are also encouraged to think about and develop a lesson plan that you can use in the fall to address it with students. If you complete the course and share your lesson plan, you also get a certificate which in many instances can be used to certify PD hours. Win all around!

Finding and Evaluating Information: This course walks you through the ins and outs of finding reliable sources of information and evaluating your search results. There is a whole module on lateral reading that I found particularly useful as I tweaked my original lesson plan to come up with the new "Stop the Fake News Cycle"(to open this link, and all the subsequent following lesson plan links, you will need to register on the KQEDTeach platform).

Safety and Privacy in a Participatory Culture: This course addresses online safety from the perspective of consumers of digital media, the development of your online persona and most importantly, navigating the privacy settings and terms of service of different platforms. After taking this course my whole approach to clicking "I agree" changed, and led to a better iteration of my Digital Citizenship lesson plan.

Understanding Copyright and Fair Use: Not only does this course help you dive more deeply into copyright and fair use and gives you tools to go beyond clicking "usage rights" when teaching this to students, it also provides you with ways to address the proper attribution of several forms of media. After taking this course, I knew that many of my lessons would need to fully address how my students were using media to support their knowledge and led to the inclusion of these concepts in lessons such as the one I used to exemplify how I plan to incorporate this moving forward (Proper Attribution)

Constructing Media Messages: Building upon the previous courses, this course also includes how to deconstruct media to interpret hidden messages and identify biases. The course puts you, and by extension your students, in the role of creators of media. To exemplify the lengths to which advertisers go to spread their message and how images can be manipulated I developed a completely new lesson as a final product for this course entitled Media Fake Out, which though I have not taught, I plan to incorporate at the beginning of the school year.

These are the courses that I've found most helpful under the umbrella of digital citizenship for educators on KQED teach, but as you explore you will also find many others to address media creation in your classroom. There is even one that specifically talks about managing and assessing media projects! As your summer winds down, I invite you to hone your skills and join me on KQED Teach.