Week 8 (February 23 - March 1, 2014)

This week's topic: Teaching Internet and Technology Skills to Young People.

In this day and age with all the rapidly advancing technology it is more and more important for children to learn skills and strategies to be competent and knowledgeable technology users in the most important ways.

Key understandings are: Using the Internet for research, using media like videos and PowerPoint effectively and keyboarding.

As for using the Internet for research, an emphasis on teaching about about plagiarism and finding reliable sources is important. It is so easy to plagiarise when doing a report or writing a research article because schools put pressure on kids to write long papers and we find ourselves obligated to grab a bunch of words from a encyclopedia definition or academic journal article and just plunk it down in the body of the paper to get to the length of paper or number of words the teacher said is a minimum without really understanding what we are doing. I think it is more important to teach kids about understanding what they are putting down rather than writing a paper that is 5 or 10 pages. Quality really is better than quantity in this situation. Teach kids to understand if they did not write something without copying it from another source then they need to give appropriate reference to it. As an extreme example, I would much rather see a student submit a two-page paper about lions in Africa and see a quotation mark at the beginning of the paragraph and not another end quotation until the last sentence but they had that whole quote referenced as opposed to seeing a five page paper with no quotations marks where it was clear the words were not from the student. Modelling correct sourcing habits would be my key to teaching this skill.

There are now many, many online resources and books to help people improve the quality and effectiveness of using videos and PowerPoint to communicate a message. Showing many exemplars would be a good strategy for learning and allowing students many opportunities to try it themselves would also be good.

Learning the skill of touch (no look!) typing is a very important one, I think. It is one that I would find opportunities to allow students to develop by perhaps giving them fun typing games to do when they have finished their other games or incorporating touch typing into ELA.

It is a great techno-age we are in and the best thing we can do it teach people how to make the most out of it all.