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Wednesday, June 30, 2010
Think #7
I went to yahoo answers, because my daughter that is going into the 5th grade seems to think that this site has the answers to EVERYTHING! I asked a couple of different general questions like how to set a table and what is the cube root of 27 (no one had answered that one yet) and got some interesting questions. I then asked it whether or not K2 was a dangerous drug and got a whole host of different answers. Apparently, she uses this site all of the time at school. I am not sure how I feel about the fact that she takes these answers as fact. I definitely think that our children need to be educated about verifying the sources and answers that they get...
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Exactly! Too many times students take whatever they have found on the web as the absolute truth/fact! It really is dependent on what the classroom teacher accepts as a source of information. If the teacher accepts wikipedia as a reliable source of information then their students will too no matter what I(the librarian) say. :-(
ReplyDeleteIt seems like many of the kids will not verify their facts. It is like a rumor, if they heard it, it must be true. I am not sure how to teach kids to verify their what they consider facts. In my advisory, I would have several kids working on physics and they would ask me a question. We would go to the internet and retrieve an answer but I was never completely positive on its validity. I would always talk to the kids trying to determine if the answer we got went along with what they learned in class.
ReplyDeleteThe kids have the internet, what did we have when we were growing up that we took as fact without questioning?
I'm pretty sure I took print sources as fact but those were checked before printing so they actually were factual.
ReplyDeleteEven though it's still not a 100% rule: if you can find the same answer on 3 different reputable websites, the information is usually good information. There are a whole list of "rules" that we teach the kids in BCIS for surfing for information, but this one has always stuck out to me as a good rule-of-thumb.
ReplyDeleteI have had my students do internet searches before and it's amazing how little effort they take to make sure they source they find is correct. I will get multiple wrong answers to something because they didn't take the time to either make sure it's a reliable website or like Ann had said, at least make sure that the information they found is pretty much the common answer.
ReplyDeleteHow do the students determine if the web site is reputable?
ReplyDelete