Sunday, May 30, 2010

Crap Detection

Crap Detection
I enjoyed watching Howard Reingold’s video on credibility and the internet. I have spent a lot of time this year working with my student’s on being critical when using the internet. I found Reingold’s five literacies for internet usage very helpful.
To recap, here are the five literacies:
1. Attention
2. Participation
3. Cooperation
4. Critical consumption (crap detection)
5. Network awareness

We’re very lucky at our school to have a very knowledgeable teacher-librarian who has made it a priority to teach all the grade 6 students media literacy skills. This means that all the students receive the same information as well as the teachers. She has developed some excellent lessons that deal specifically with crap detection. These lessons all revolve around teaching our children to think for themselves as there is so much information out there in cyber-land. However, I think that we as classroom teachers, must also make a commitment to teaching our students to be critical thinkers. If we all took time in September to go through the five literacies, perhaps we would not have so many issues to deal with during the year.

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