Today I worked with the 8th grade language arts classes on website evaluation. I created a lesson and taught it to two classes at the same time, about 55 students each hour. We met in the computer lab which has a large meeting area with a computer hooked up to a large projection LCD player and then two labs for students to use on each side. I started out the lesson with a large group discussion about what students already know about good websites. Some of the most common answers were checking for an author and seeing what was at the end of the web address like .gov, .edu, .org, etc. Next I passed out a handout about the 5 W's of website evaluation and we read through it together. Then I showed them 3 questionable websites on the LCD player and had them look for red lights on them. The three sites I picked came from a site created by Kathy Schrock, (along with the 5 W's handout) and were about he history of Fisher Price Airplanes, a google technology post from an April Fool's Day, and the Ban Dihydrogen Monoxide (H2O) page. Then I passed out an "Evaluating Websites" worksheet that I created with a little help from Kathy Schrock. The students are working on a persuasive essay and needed to find a website related to their topic and evaluate it. The worksheet had a series of yes/no questions about the site and then at the end it asked the students to give it a ranking from 1-10 and then explain why they would or wouldn't recommend it for use with their project. The last part of class everyone came back to the main room and I showed them an excellent site that the district provides for them, SIRS. I walked through a couple searches with them on the site and how they have information on both sides of an issue.
Overall I thought it went well. There were a few hiccups along the way. Initially first hour I couldn't figure out how to get my computer image projected on the screen through the LCD player. Help did come fairly quickly and showed me what I was missing. Then, during sixth hour, the screen was showing just a blank blue screen at the start of class so I had to skip the questionable website portion, but I was able to get it up again, just in time for the fire drill that we had toward the end of the hour. Then seventh hour the screen went out again towards the end and I wasn't able to go over the SIRS with them. Other than the couple technological glitches and the fire drill, everything went well and I think the students got a lot out of today. They will be working in the computer lab tomorrow as well and I hope a lot of the students will put to work what they learned today.
middle school hours today: 7.5
middle school hours total: 13.5
high school hours total: 4
secondary hours total: 17.5
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