Response to "Week 2 Ch. 5: Elaborate: Technology Integration Workshop"

Technology Integration Workshop p. 168-169:

Part 2:

I'm going to provide the links to the three lessons I discovered along with some brief thoughts on each.

a. 1) http://www.educationworld.com/a_tech/how-to-use-wikipedia-for-academics.shtml

This lesson (presented at the end of an article bashing Wikipedia) has only the faintest outlines of an actual lesson. It asks students to essentially fact-check Wikipedia and to discover its inaccuracies, and to try to personally correct them with appropriate citations and sourcing.

Since I think we ought to be more trusting of Wikipedia and its potential, I'm skeptical of this lesson's aims. Although I appreciate the lengths it suggests a class should go in the name of digital literacy.

2) http://mediasmarts.ca/sites/mediasmarts/files/pdfs/lesson-plan/Lesson_Taming_Wild_Wiki.pdf

This lesson does a superior job of what the previously linked lesson thought it was trying to do. The lesson acknowledges that Wikipedia pages are a bundle of good and bad, and it's up to the teacher to help guide students through the benefits as well as the pitfalls.

3) http://www.readwritethink.org/classroom-resources/lesson-plans/collaborating-writing-linking-using-1087.html?tab=4#tabs

This lesson takes an unusual approach to looking at Wikipedia: a form of storytelling. The lesson teaches students about a variety of different atypical forms of storytelling and asks students to tell a story using the format Wikipedia uses with subheadings and hyperlinks to other pages.

This is a very cool and unusual lesson that uses Wikipedia for very original and creative ends.

b. 1)


2)


3)

 c. I like the idea of teaching students how to properly engage with Wikipedia. As I discussed in a previous post, I think Wikipedia is a great resource and the criticisms it typically gets are overly simplistic and unfair. Wikipedia is a go-to for most people as a source of information, and I genuinely think it ought to be. But I'll also be the first to admit that Wikipedia has flaws. However, those flaws really aren't widespread or glaring enough to justify outright dismissing the site.

Instead, I think a lesson that teaches students to be more critical consumers of online content would be very beneficial. And I don't just mean teaching them how to use Wikipedia, but that certainly should be part of the lesson and process. No, what I mean is directing students toward how to effectively use search engines. How to sift through all the countless links and websites out there. To have initial resources for looking up information and doing research so that they have a starting foundation.

Part of that is going to be teaching students to use Google for purposes other than generic searches. So for starters, that means demonstrating how to do more advanced searches. But it only means uses other tools from Google such as Google Scholar, Google News, Google Books

If the school has access to any databases (LexisNexis, Ebsco, JStor, etc.), students need to be made aware of that and encouraged to utilize them. 

Part 3:

a. -Technology is the point of this lesson. It's not just a mere integration; the lesson couldn't exist without it.  The advantage is the technology and student growth in understanding of how to use it.

-Access to technology is this case is as simple as having access to a set of computers and the Internet.

 b. -The Objective is: Students will understand how to effectively do research online.

-This research would eventually be used to do research projects over the course of the year.

-This is direct integration approach, but eventually once students have an understanding of the technology you can start shifting to a constructivist approach and set them loose to have at it with the technology.

-The class would need to be in a computer lab or have access to a set of computers or laptops in some form.

c. - I'd use the Tech-Pack after the fact to self-evaluate my performance. I'd also assess the success based on students' reactions and the outcome of assignments.

d. -Some potential descriptors for this lesson include: 9th-12th grade, Digital Literacy, Technologies used: computer, Internet, Wikipedia, Google, ISTE Standards: Standard 3: Research and information fluency, Standard 5: Digital citizenship, 21st Century Standards: Standard 3: Information, Media and Technology Skills