BlogDale

Today was a Good Day for eLearning at my school. I was asked by the Director of Science to help with a lesson on Global Warming (more hot air, I figured) that had an Information Literacy focus so that the students could learn about how to make a judgement on what to trust on the Internet. After an initial forum discussion, they have produced a wiki of their findings, commenting on the validity and authenticity of the sites they found. I love it when a plan comes together. Referring back to Alan November’s information literacy materials, I created a Moodle course that led the students through a number of aspects of cross-referencing, finding out site owners and verifying data. They took part in a forum where they exchanged views on a number of sites, and rated each others’ postings as to their relevance and value to the discussion. They used different search engines to cross-reference searches and they used whois to verify site owners and make their own judgement on whether information was reliable looking at what linked to them using the altavista “links:2 trick. I love it when an idea comes together like this - it took about 5 minutes to explain to them how to use a wiki and they were off writing on their own pages, editing and creating links. They have a week to complete the exercise for their homework and I am sure it will be awesome.