Month: September 2019

Now that I’m at the end of the reading part of my tech research, it’s time to share what I’ve learned and found before I launch into my next phase – trying it out! When I started, I was interested in three areas: twitter, augmented reality, and developing better fact checking techniques. While I found a number of articles and videos for the Twitter (mostly at the beginner level) and evaluating information especially (many on the Stanford study, though I haven’t included them because I’m more interested in the strategies than the research), there were not too many on AR, and they were not terribly helpful. These are the 7 that I found most relevant and helpful.

While I was very excited about the posibilities of augmented reality, the two apps I found that best fit what I want to do, HP Reveal & Layar, have proven to be frustratingly unavailable. What I’d really like to do is to be able to take an object (like a shovel, a uniform, etc.) which the students can touch and use the AR platform to link it to text, pictures, videos, websites etc. Of the two platforms, Layar had the better fit since you could probably get it to do this. It seems like HP Reveal could only be used with print. Unfortunately, Layar is no long in existence, and the other popular platforms (like Metaverse) did not seem to meaningfully require students to interact with actual physical objects. For now, I have put this line of inquiry aside. Perhaps someone will be able to point me in a better direction later.

With Twitter, one of the goals I have is to find a better way to embed my timeline into our SLLC website, and more specifically to send only specifically curated links to different pages so that any great science links I can send to the science page, socials to the socials page, and so on. I suspected that I could do this with hashtags, but I’ve since learned about Twitter lists! Hopefully this will help. Wired magazine has a good article on how to get started with lists and some helpful suggestions about whether or not to make them private or public: “Want a Saner Twitter Experience? Start Using Lists.”  While lists seem like a helpful start, I think that they still aren’t the final solution, and I may have to use hashtags as well. Really, I think I’ll have to do some trial and error.

I’m still pretty new to Twitter and I have really only been using it to replace my print newspapers, so I’ve found some great beginner how to guides from Teach Thought: “The Honest-To-Goodness Beginner’s Guide To Twitter For Teachers,” and “Twitter For Learning: 7 Ideas For Using Hashtags In The Classroom” Both were easy to follow, and not so simplistic that I felt they wasted my time. Along with the how to’s on each page, there were great tips, and some very important etiquette. I’m a late comer to a community that has highly evolved. Don’t want to just blunder my way in and make a mess. Another beginner guide that I really like is from Scholastic: “Twitter for Teachers: A Beginner’s Guide to Getting Started.” It has much of the same information as the one in Teach Thought, but it also has a great list of terminology that teachers and students could use. There’s not too much else to it though.

The last part that I want to focus on is on developing stronger methods for evaluating information, specifically online. I’ve found a great online text book, a great series of lessons from Media Smarts called “Authenticating Information,” and a list of “7 steps to better fact checking“. What I really like about these seven steps from PolitiFact is that they are concise, consistent with the book and Media Smarts resources, but more interestingly, that they were published in 2014 before so much of the rhetoric around fake news was in our feeds daily. These steps seem to be standing up to time.

The series of Media Smart lessons are very helpful because they have videos, student handouts, lesson plans, and just generally a lot of great suggestions and information. I’ve tried them out with my grade 11’s and they worked well. What I also like about the lessons in “Authenticating Information” is that they have embraced the lessons that came out of the Stanford University study which revealed that most people, adults and teens, are either very inefficient at authenticating information, or they are frankly bad at it.

One of the interesting items to come out of the Stanford Study is how use of tools like the CRAAP test have proven to be ineffective, and actually cause users to falsely believe they have solid information. Mike Caufield worked with some of the researchers of the Stanford Study to create the free textbook, Web Literacy for Student Fact-Checkers. It is an easy to read online book that not only provides valuable background information, but also some very practical strategies. I am really looking forward to working more with this text!

Now the fun part begins! Time to experiment with what I’ve learned!

Works Cited

“Authenticating Information.” MediaSmarts, 5 Feb. 2019, http://mediasmarts.ca/digital-media-literacy/digital-issues/authenticating-information.

Caulfield, Mike. Web Literacy for Student Fact-Checkers, Self-Published, 8 Jan. 2017, https://webliteracy.pressbooks.com/front-matter/web-strategies-for-student-fact-checkers/.

Drobnic Holan, Angie. “7 Steps to Better Fact-Checking.” PolitiFact, Poynter Institute, 20 Aug. 2014, https://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/article/2014/aug/20/7-steps-better-fact-checking/.

Everette, Meghan. “Twitter for Teachers: A Beginner’s Guide to Getting Started.” Scholastic, 10 Oct. 2018, https://www.scholastic.com/teachers/blog-posts/meghan-everette/twitter-teachers-beginners-guide-getting-started/.

Heick, Terry, and Lesley University Online. “The Honest-To-Goodness Beginner’s Guide To Twitter For Teachers.” TeachThought, 28 Aug. 2017, https://www.teachthought.com/technology/the-honest-to-goodness-beginners-guide-for-twitter-for-teachers/.

McMahon, Jordan. “Want a Saner Twitter Experience? Start Using Lists.” Wired, Conde Nast, 13 Mar. 2018, https://www.wired.com/story/how-to-set-up-twitter-lists/.

Pacheco, Anibal. “Twitter For Learning: 7 Ideas For Using Hashtags In The Classroom.” TeachThought, 28 Aug. 2017, https://www.teachthought.com/technology/twitter-for-learning-7-ideas-for-using-hashtags-in-the-classroom/.

Twitter help:

“The Honest to Goodness Beginner’s Guide for Twitter for Teachers“

“Twitter for Learning: 7 Ideas for Using Hashtags in the Classroom“
Teach Thought has had the best explanation and depth to the beginner’s guide, and in using hashtags that I’ve come across so far. Many of the other sites where about how to set up Twitter, but I’m much more interested in ways to use Twitter. The beginner’s guide is still quite simple, but it has a lot of great links to other topics or tools that go deeper (and that I would like to explore). The article on using hashtags had a lot of great explanation of what hashtags do, the etiquette of using hashtags, how you might want to use them, and great examples of hashtags to follow.

“Twitter for Teachers: A Beginner’s Guide to Getting Started“

Generally, one beginner’s guide is enough, but I liked the explanation of the Twitter lingo in this one. It’s great for teachers, and great for students.

 

Evaluation of internet sources:

Web Literacy for Student Fact-Checkers by Mike Caulfield

This free online book is designed to help teachers specifically, and anyone else as well, learn the skills they need so that we can teach better evaluation of internet sources. This book breaks down the process into four fairly easy steps based on how most fact checkers work: check for previous work, go upstream, read laterally, and circle back. The explanations seem very easy to follow so far, and are based on some interesting research by Stanford University.

 

Evaluating Information: The Cornerstone of Civic Online Reasoning

Wineburg, Sam and McGrew, Sarah and Breakstone, Joel and Ortega, Teresa. (2016).

This study out of Stanford University is very eye opening about how poorly many of us, even educated people like teachers and professors, are at authenticating information on line. It is interesting just to see the results of the research, and very important to read their recommendations. I know that in Canada and the United States this research prompted some funding and policy changes.

 

“Authenticating Information” by Media Smarts

Media Smarts is a Canadian not-for-profit organization that promotes digital and media literacy. This section on Authenticating Information is broken down into subtopics, each of which have great explanations and ideas. Beyond just the textual information, there are many, many, many teacher resources that have been updated over the last year to incorporate some of the fact checking ideas that came out of the Stanford study. There are some incredibly relevant ones, like “Online Propaganda and the Proliferation of Hate” and “Reality Check” – there is a nice quick video about checking information, especially around elections.

There are two main areas I am interested in exploring more throughout the New Media Course: 1) curating a correcting of apps and platforms useful school wide, and 2) developing better lessons and strategies for effective evaluation of internet sources, as well as digital security. In the wake of a great many privacy issues and fake news scandals, the second topic is an area that I would like far more training in for myself. I don’t want to needlessly be a victim if l can reasonably prevent it. I also see it as an area where we really need to be diligent as educators to make sure that our students leave high school well equipped to understand how to guard against the manipulations of so many different interest groups (commercial and political) competing for our attention. This also tires into my first area of interest. Students are often using platforms without understanding the potential, and sometimes the pitfalls. I’d like to be far more proficient so I can help structure assignments that use a number of these platforms in ways that help students better understand the potential of how they could more effectively use technology, and in ethical ways.

These are important areas that I and many of my colleagues have expressed interest and concern in developing. We need to be more proficient before we can teach students to be proficient and responsible. I am looking forward to testing some of the strategies and ideas I learn on my New Media class, and then helping to co-teach these ideas and strategies through my position as teacher-librarian.

Some of the apps and platforms I would like to learn more about are:

Twitter (using # for various purposes),Instagram,

augmented reality apps like HP Reveal

Instagram,

augmented reality apps like HP Reveal

Some of the resources I have found around evaluation of internet sources are:

Web Literacy for Student Fact-Checkers by Mike Caulfield

which I found through the article “Students Fall for Misinformation…” by Beckie Supiano

“Sorting Fact from Fiction” by Media Smarts

I was also really intrigued by a Netflix documentary, The Great Hack, about the Cambridge Analytica scandal.

Resources

Amer, K. (producer), & Amer, K. and J. Noujaim (directors). (2019). The Great Hack [Motion Picture]. United States: Netflix

Caulfield, M. (2017). Web literacy for student fact-checkers. Mountain View, CA: Michael Arthur Caulfield.

Media Smarts. (n.d.). Sorting fact from fiction. Retrieved from http://mediasmarts.ca/digital-media-literacy/digital-issues/authenticating-information/verifying-online-news/sorting-fact-fiction

Supiano, B. (2019). Students fall for misinformation online. is teaching them to read like fact checkers the solution? The Chronicle of Higher Education, www.chronicle.com/article/Students-Fall-for/246190/#.XMr1S31HO1k.twitter