EVERYTHING
FOR YOUR FAMILY
KID
QUIPS
During last July’s 5.8 earthquake, 3-year-old Bronwyn told her 1-year-old sister, “We’re going for a wiggle.” READ MORE
Education
|
||||
|
How to safely use the online revolution
Your fourth-grader comes home with a new school research assignment on California missions, logs onto the computer and starts looking up information. A Yahoo search yields 7.1 million hits. Now what? If adults can feel overwhelmed at times on the Internet, imagine how lost a 10-year-old would be researching a topic online without proper guidance from teachers and parents. There’s no question the Internet is a valuable and dominant educational tool for today’s students. While teens in high school have largely figured out how to navigate the Web to find valid, accurate and relevant information for homework and school projects, elementary and middle school students need help from parents and teachers to wade through it all. Of course, doing so safely is key; a parent should be present at all times when the computer is on, OC Family Magazine advises. “We really need to be structuring the searches for them. Most teachers will give students a list of sites for them to search. That’s how we build the skills,” says Robert Craven, coordinator for educational technology for the Orange County Department of Education. Specific instruction School districts often train teachers to tailor Web searches for students for a specific assignment. The Riverside Unified School District, for example, trains teachers to create a “WebQuest” – a teacher-generated activity with content-specific, appropriate websites selected for students to reference for that project, explains David Haglund, Riverside Unified’s instructional specialist for K-6 technology. Teachers also give students “link sheets,” which are specially-created Word documents that lead a student to a specific link, Haglund says. Parents are advised to make sure their children use these teacher-provided websites. The home computer should be located in a common area where an adult can easily see what the kids are doing online, Haglund says. “Make sure you walk through the room on a regular basis.” Wide impact on education Using the Internet for school work has many benefits: It promotes critical thinking skills in children, helps teach students to collaborate with others, and helps students learn media skills they will need to succeed in the workforce, says Craven, a former English and social studies teacher who is a designated Apple Computers Distinguished Educator. Students can write online, build websites, create images and make PowerPoint presentations; “It gives them an opportunity to author things,” adds Pamela Ezell, an assistant professor of English at Chapman University in Orange who teaches about the Internet, its impacts, and writing for the Internet. There are pitfalls, however. Cheating and plagiarizing are easy; students can cut and paste large chunks of material from a report and present it as original work, Ezell says. To combat this, many schools and universities, including Chapman and UCLA, now subscribe to the anti-plagiarism website turnitin.com, says Ezell. Also, without adult guidance, students in the lower grades may not be able to distinguish between unbiased and accurate information from what is presented on a commercial site – and possibly written by other consumers, not unbiased experts. “It does us all good to pay attention to the consumerism on the Internet. Almost nothing online is neutral. It has something to sell, something to prove, something to show,” Ezell says. “It’s a question of veracity.” Consider the source Ezell advises students to use the resource lists that teachers provide and avoid doing general Yahoo or Google searches. Students should seek out non-commercial websites of legitimate, nonprofit organizations, professional associations, government agencies, universities, libraries, school districts and large media outlets. Ezell also advises, “Avoid sources or research that’s not clearly documented. Avoid research that’s connected to a commercial concern. And ask, ‘How recent is the information?’ If it’s a topic like terrorism or stem-cell research, that’s current; if the information is more than a year old, it’s not very valid.” A good source is the Orange County Department of Education’s own resource, kitzu.org. From KitZu, students can download text, images, music, videos and other material for school projects, and research a variety of subjects. In addition, this August, the California Department of Education and the University of California launched Calisphere, calisphere.universityofcalifornia.edu. Educators, students and the public can access more than 150,000 sources from the libraries and museums of the UC campuses and cultural heritage organizations statewide, and link to other UC-related websites. Websites for young students calisphere.universityofcalifornia.edu kitzu.org kidsclick.org ajkids.com kids.infoplease.com britannica.com encarta.com sciencemadesimple.com awesomelibrary.org thinkquest.org answers.com schoolwork.org Amy Bentley of Temecula is a regular contributor to OC Family Magazine. Libraries still matter Not long ago, some predicted that books on paper would become irrelevant or disappear, replaced by text on computer screens. They were wrong. The book is still around. Some also said libraries would vanish in the computer age, or just become places where students could go to do Internet research. Wrong again. Libraries are still here, filled with computers and books. • Numerous research studies conducted during the past decade also indicate that well-stocked, professionally staffed school libraries contribute to improved student achievement on standardized tests, an important finding in our era of accountability in public education. • Research findings from more than 4,000 schools in more than a dozen U.S. states indicate links between academic achievement and strong school libraries, as measured by librarian activities, collection size, staffing levels, technology integration and library usage, according to a 2004 article called “Libraries are Key” in Reading Today, a publication of the International Reading Association. • The American public loves its libraries as well. A study released in June by the public opinion research organization Public Agenda found that Americans view libraries as potential solutions to community problems like providing safe places for teens to be productive. |
||||
RSS Subscribe
Digg This ArticleSEARCH THE SITE
