Everyone deserves an education that is well sourced and enjoyable. Before attending today's class, I would never have used Wikipedia professionally. My field is science, and sourcing is one of our big current topics. Student teaching is fast approaching and I'm glad to have some current knowledge about how to introduce that topic. I plan to show my students the quality scale, new ways search, and how to find newspaper articles. I may use it, in a limited fashion, perhaps in warm up activities for class.
Searching Google in more meaningful and specific ways is helpful. In my heart, I am a traditional learner. I cannot imagine teaching without textbooks. I believe in the bedrock of teaching traditional scientific methods to students, while working in a field that changes daily. I will enjoy challenging my students to review what was considered "truth" 100 years ago, that has changed. I want my subject to be meaningful and culturally relevant to my students. Comparing views of a topic from different countries will be one helpful way of doing that. One of my goals with our MIT training was to find ways to work with the hand held technology that is present in every high school in America, instead of trying to swim upstream against the trend. I plan to stay politically neutral, but I'd like students to have evidence to back up their thoughts and opinions on hot topics such as ecology (save the salmon vs save fishing livelihoods) and climate change. One way to do this might be to search .gov sights on climate change in the United States versus Norway, Finland and China. I am personally uncomfortable with the thought of information on science coming from sources other than peer reviewed journals, but I realize that I will need to broaden my perspective of legitimate sources, and teach my students to do likewise.
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ReplyDeleteHi Brita!
ReplyDeleteI, too, love textbooks, and am saddened by the fact that they won't be our best resource in the classroom. I love the idea of using "site:" tool on google to have students look up different perspectives on politically-charged science topics--I plan to do something very similar, but with contested historical topics, or even current events if I end up teaching a Current World Problems class.
Here's a thought for you: one of the socio-political problems we're dealing with in America right now is scientific illiteracy. People read sensational news articles in newspapers or magazines that claim things like "New Study Shows that Chocolate Prevents Cancer!" or something similar (like this article: http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/health-and-families/health-news/chocolate-a-cure-for-cancer-765754.html, for example). I know several people who fall victim to this kind of sensationalism on a regular basis. As a science teacher, can you think of any ways to teach students how to use some of the tools we learned about today to cross-check against these kinds of articles? (I'm genuinely asking! I have some ideas, but you're the burgeoning expert!)
I think that the applications of these research tools to a setting like a highschool science classroom are maybe less obvious than their application to a social studies or English classroom, but wouldn't it be cool to have your students do their own experiments, video tape their results, and then upload that video and their analysis to something like Wikijunior?
Thanks for your perspective! And good luck navigating this crazy technological snowball of a world.