Notes from Millie D

Brian Mull is presenting today at the Northern York County Collaborative workshop day.  Brian is presenting 2 sesssions this morning.  The first session was on Critical Thinking on the Web:  Information Liteacy.  The session highlighted a lot of topics that educators need to consider when integrating technology in the classroom.  If we don’t figure this thing out our students are going to still do and probably not ethically nor responsible.

The session started with a brief overview of “The World is Flat” type presentation.  Brian challenged educators to change the model for the use of technology so it can talk hold for everyone.  Otherwise all we’re doing is adding boxes, wires to classroom and just throwing money at a problem.

The session continued with a mention that teachers need to change the way teachers pose questions or problems to their students to prevent a copy/paste experience.  The rest of the session went over “smart” searching.  I wasn’t aware of NoodleQuest.  NoodleQuest is a search tool that helps the users figure out the best search tool to use based on the topic.  Users can check off the items that they need and the site figures out the best site(s) to use.

I was also exposed  to a simple set of guidelines to help students validate websites when researching topics:  REAL.

Read the URL

Examine the content

Ask questions about the author/site

Look at the links coming in/going out

I will definitely be using this in the classroom. Thanks Brian!
The second session is on Blogs, Podcasts, Wikis, etc.