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.
This is a decent post of your early results with some discussion and evaluation of these resources as potential final selections. More discussion and reflection on the process, your results, how you are searching, where you are searching and what you are not finding would be valuable to include. This post helps reflect and digest on the process of inquiry, but seems to be a bit too focused on the end results, rather than how we got here. Your Part C will have the final annotations and selections, but this needed a bit more narrative on the process. Overall, a good amount of progress on your inquiry and some great resources to carry forward.