Tag Archives: information literacy

Are You a Restless Learner?

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Have you ever picked up a book only to discover at some point that you’ve already read it? I keep telling myself I’m going to stay current with my Goodreads account or try to find that small journal I started several years ago to keep track of books I’ve read. The busier I get the more this task sinks to the bottom of my to-do list, but every so often something jolts me back to reality and I know I really have to get more organized with my ‘have read’ list.

I recently picked up A Tale for the Time Being by Ruth Ozeki, a mesmerizing and meditative tale of time and how we inhabit it. It wasn’t until I was close to the end of the book (about 400 pages in) that the scene where Ruth’s dog is missing and turns up under her porch stirred a distant memory and it was then I realized that I had already read this book—probably about seven years ago if my memory serves me well. Lists are great, don’t get me wrong, but I realize if I had kept that list, I probably wouldn’t have reread this book given all the others in my ‘need to read’ pile. But, oh, what I would have missed by not being immersed once again in a book that brought me so much pleasure and that I’d gladly read again.

Book lists aside, I do, however, keep a list of the professional development I attend, mostly because I like to stay abreast of trends in the field of education and librarianship, and a list helps me keep track of gaps in my knowledge and areas I want to revisit. This summer, I’ve found a number of invaluable PD opportunities that are helping me hit my professional goals for the coming year. So here’s what I’ve added to my PD list so far—perhaps you might find them helpful, as well.

How to Save Ourselves from Disinformation with The New York Times

This webinar, presented by The New York Times, was short but packed with lots of great examples students, especially older ones, will likely be able to relate to. Of particular interest is the segment, “A Conversation With Former Radicals, Caleb Cain and Caolan Robertson” that starts at 2:51 and addresses radicalization that happens through YouTube. Later in the video, comedian Sarah Silverman talks about her perspective on who to follow for the truth. You can watch the entire webinar here:


NewsLit Camp with CNN and the Wall Street Journal

At the top of my list of research skills to focus on this year will be helping my students develop the skills to discern fact from fiction, understand the role disinformation and misinformation plays in the news landscape, as well as the role journalists and a free press plays in our democracy. I attended two of The News Literacy Project’s #NewsLitCamps and found them incredibly informative. Listening to reporters from CNN and the Wall Street Journal gave me personal insight into the challenges facing journalists and the media in reporting controversial and challenging issues. As part of the #NewsLitCamps, the NLP provides participants with an overwhelming array of resources to help put together a meaningful unit on this topic.

In addition to their outreach programming, they are the creators of Checkology, interactive lessons to test your students’ knowledge and understanding of what makes a source credible. These lessons help students develop skills to evaluate reliable sources and information and allow them (and you) to chart their progress. Last year I used their Checkology platform in my New Student Seminar and found the options to have students either work independently or as a group on their tutorials added to its functionality and allowed me to adapt assignments based on what we were covering or was happening in the news at the time. I’m pleased to see they have added a new lesson on Conspiratorial Thinking. Checkology is free and has lots of wonderful educator resources, including their weekly newsletter, The Sift, to keep you up-to-date on relevant media news along with examples of recent misinformation and resources to get the conversation going with your students.They also will connect you with a journalist for a virtual or in-person visit – check out their Newsroom-to-Classroom resources for more information.

Designing for Equity | The Global Online Academy

While my school will be back fully in person next year, I love the flexibility of creating hybrid lessons that I can use to support all of my students. Last year I took part in GOA’s Design Bootcamp and this year I continued with their free Designing for Equity five-day course. Each day we explored ways to disrupt, design, and discuss key elements essential to equitable design: Community, Content, Assessment, and Grading. We explored first-hand accounts, heard teacher and student voices and discussed ways to create a learning environment where all of our students feel welcome and one that encourages them to feel that they belong. I found the resources on grading for equity challenged me to think about what that assigned number really means—to me and especially to my students. I would encourage anyone who struggles with the concept and process of grading to check out Joe Friedman’s Grading for Equity. Readings from it have encouraged me to think more deeply about my grades and evaluate if they: 1) describe a S’s level of mastery, 2) evaluate Ss based on their knowledge, not their environment, history, or behavior, 3) support hope and a growth mindset, and 4) ‘lift the veil’ on how to succeed. Numbers three and four resonate with me as my goals for my students include helping them develop a sense of agency over their own learning and belief in themselves that they are capable of succeeding. This course left me with an extensive reading list which I plan to add to our Race, Racism, and Anti-Racism guide, so stay tuned if you’re interested in exploring more.

ThinkerAnalytix: How We Argue

The homepage on ThinkerAnalytix says it all:

ThinkerAnalytix has partnered with the Harvard Department of Philosophy to help students develop logical thinking skills through the use of argument mapping using the interactive platform Mindmup Atlas. ThinkerAnalytix offers a subscription-based course which a number of our member independent schools use, but there are also lots of free interactive puzzles/ argument maps (referred to as ‘toy arguments’) that you can use to help students master critical thinking skills, effectively communicate their independently formed ideas, and engage in productive discussions taking into account opposing points of view. This two-day workshop was truly inspiring as the sessions were run by teachers at the middle, secondary and university level who currently incorporate argument mapping into their curriculum. Many of the presenters were philosophy majors or faculty who taught philosophy courses and possessed strong argumentation skills. Listening to them makes me regret not having taken any philosophy courses in college—something all of our students would benefit from, as well. I could also see this being a useful complement to the question formulation technique (QFT) I explored in the Right Question Institute’s course on Teaching Students to Ask their Own Primary Source Questions, which I’ll save for another post.

AISL Summer Institute 2021: Incubating Creativity

Last, but definitely not least, my favorite PD this summer was our own AISL Summer Institute 2021: Incubating Creativity hosted by Melinda Holmes at Darlington School, Rome, GA and facilitated by the authors of the book of the same name, Incubating Creativity at Your Library, Laura Damon-Moore and Erinn Batykefer. While I learned so much from the other PD I did this summer, I think you all can relate to the challenge of being a librarian in a sea of teachers. I’m approaching the learning primarily from the POV of how I can use this knowledge to collaborate with teachers on these skills, while their focus is on how they can incorporate the skills into their curriculum. It’s definitely given me insight into how I might approach future collaborations.

That said, the Summer Institute is great because as colleagues from an academic perspective, we share similar goals to more fully integrate our library program into the curriculum and the academic life of the school. I loved hearing what other folks were doing and appreciated the care that Melinda put into the structure of the day. Although it was virtual, between content sessions we had the opportunity to do stretching with Kate Grantham, slow drawing with Lisa Elchuk, and book art with Michael Jacobs who makes amazing book art for the Darlington School. During the content sessions we explored how we might bring creative programming into our ongoing library programs. I feel blessed to be part of such a creative, committed group of librarians. I’ll leave you with a sampling of some of the brainstorming/planning we accomplished individually and collaboratively.

If, like me, you find yourself having to explain why you’re spending so much of your time off actually enjoying a deep dive into PD this summer, perhaps edX will help—their motto is: “Restless learners change the world” (or at least our little corner of it).

Note: For those of you concerned that all I’m doing is professional development this summer, I would like to put your mind at ease. I have been indulging my newly found love of growing Dahlias, introduced to me by a colleague at work (thanks, Rebecca!). This is my third summer growing them and I’m just beginning to feel like I know what I’m doing. Each year, I learn a little bit more about how to care for them so they can be their best, most beautiful selves. Here are a few blooms from last summer to provide inspiration to my current plants, who hopefully will get the hint and start blooming any week now.

Here’s hoping everyone has a restful, growthful summer!

Agency from anywhere: Why you should learn to edit Wikipedia, and teach your students, too!

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Recently, my younger child declared I have a new motto. He even put it on a shirt for me:



“When life gives you lemons, write Wikipedia pages about amazing women”

My child observed that I spent the afternoon of January 6, 2021, watching coverage of the insurrection in DC while editing Wikipedia furiously, and that I used editing to manage my worries during other periods of uncertainty over the last year. He is not wrong, but here is how I see it:

  • From my armchair I tangle with systemic inequities arising from the specific guidelines meant to make Wikipedia “more reliable.” 
  • Even while sheltering in place, I have the ability to broaden the narrative of our nation and our world as it is shaped by a source which is, arguably, a de facto arbiter of truth in our time.

While I have been guiding students in Wikipedia editing lessons since about 2010, I worked primarily with upper elementary and middle school students editing Simple English Wikipedia. When I joined the Castilleja faculty in 2013, I took over a similar project my library director, Jole Seroff, had developed. Along with the project came her notes on gender imbalance among editors and how the skew towards male editors (85% of editors, and something like 91% of all edits) impacted the content we see when we access Wikipedia. A 2011 article in the New York Times noted that who edits impacts the emphasis of the source, comparing a four-paragraph page on friendship bracelets (“A topic generally restricted to teenage girls”) to the much longer page about “something boys might favor” like baseball cards. Setting aside for a moment the gendering of topics, it is notable that today these discrepancies remain:

Sources: “All page views: ‘Baseball Cards'” and “All page views: ‘Friendship Bracelets'”

Similarly, a study released in October 2014, noted that only 15.53% of English Wikipedia’s biographies were about women. A number of groups, including WomenInRed, have focused on adding biographies about females, and they count that number rising to 18.79% as of 15 March 2021. Mountains of evidence point to lower number of pages being written about women and topics to do with women, as well as fewer editors adding information and a significantly higher deletion rate of pages about women/women’s issues because the subjects are apparently “not notable” (especially regarding STEM-focused topics).

If the numbers are so grim for women, imagine what inclusion might look like for other individuals and topics related to minoritized identities.

During the 2019-2020 school year some of my high school students became interested in hosting an edit-a-thon, and I decided it was time to actually learn how to edit for real. I attended my first in-person edit-a-thon at a local library in February, and then everything shut down. In June, my students and I decided to host a virtual edit-a-thon for Upper School students, and the real fun began.

In preparation, a number of our school librarian colleagues kindly joined me in an experimental edit-a-thon, which sufficed to demonstrate that I had picked a terrible way to organize my event. However, that afternoon also demonstrated the value of editing in community, as we each noticed different aspects of systemic prejudices in the structure of this venerated source. For example, one of our number is a classroom teacher in an English department, with a specialty in Southeast Asian American Literature. When she decided to work on the page Asian American Literature, another of our number called our attention to the Talk page, where editors discuss issues and challenges that arise in writing the page itself. In addition, due to the very reasonable desire to keep an eye on coverage in specific fields, and point out what work needs to be done, WikiProjects on various topics rate the importance of specific pages under their purview, like this:

Talk page for Asian American literature

…in which WikiProject Literature (that is, people who are interested in Wikiedia’s coverage in the field of literature) rated the Asian American literature page Low-importance.

Similarly, I was reading up on Patricia Roberts Harris. She was the first Black American female: 1. ambassador, 2. cabinet member (third Black American cabinet member overall), 3. dean of a law school, and 4. director of a Fortune 500 corporation. Here is her talk page:

Talk page for Patricia Roberts Harris

Over time, that original meeting of teachers grew into a weekly editing group. We learn by doing together, and we have learned very well just how hard it is to prove notability for genuinely notable people of color. It was actually in trying to set up a middle school Wikipedia editing project in 2018, covering notable female activists, that I really ran up against to problem of databases containing predominantly-white-perspective sources and the challenges that ensued in finding articles about non-white, non-cis-male individuals. That lesson has held firm as I try to write about women of color and struggle to meet the standard that Wikipedia articles should be “based on reliable, published sources,” meeting Wikipedia’s definition of reliable sources. There is no question that these guidelines are needed so that people do not fill pages with self-promotional material, as often used to happen. However, there is also no question that the guidelines to block self-promotion make it extremely hard to write about many genuinely notable people, as well, especially if they are not media darlings.

As an instructional librarian, I focus on teaching research skills. Therefore, I find joy in digging and in piecing together sources and arguing for their reliability (when necessary), all while avoiding running afoul of Wikipedia’s “No original research” policy. I’ve come to believe strongly in the many benefits of teaching others to edit and editing in community. I now help run three Wikipedia editing groups for: alums from my college, my students and colleagues, and other librarians/teachers.

Editing Wikipedia is a way to:

  1. “Do the work”:
    1. Decolonize your mind – if the only astrophysicist you have spent time thinking about is a LatinX transgender individual, then the picture you have in your head of an astrophysicist will be of a LatinX transgender individual
    2. Make people with minoritized identities discoverable
    3. Create or expand or improve pages that will be seen by millions of people – the least-used page I have worked on has been accessed 14 times since March 1, others have been accessed several thousand times
    4. Give others access to role models – a.k.a.: the perfect gift — I add women to Wikipedia as graduation gifts for young women who might not easily see role models in fields that interest them
  2. Build information literacy skills (for students):
    1. Explore the notion that “authority is constructed and contextual”
    2. Develop a strong sense of what a range of authoritative sources might look like
    3. Synthesize evidence to create a narrative
    4. Practice writing in the register of an encyclopedia
    5. Experience gatekeeping and its impact on knowledge construction
    6. Question why needed systems give rise to systemic prejudice
    7. Encounter systemic racism and other systemic prejudices and begin to understand their prevalence and impact
    8. Construct authority

If you would like to learn more about editing Wikipedia with students or for yourself, please join Corey Baker, Amy Pelman, Linda Swarlis, and myself at the upcoming AISL conference on April 9 for “Equity through Editing: Contributing to Wikipedia for Social Justice Inside and Outside the Classroom,” or reach out to any of us for more information.

Imagining Multiple Perspectives: Experimenting with “Priority-Based Perspectives”

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This year, our school’s annual, 40+ hour, 5-month-long, co-curricular project with our ninth graders took place over six hours during the first week of January.

During this project students work in groups to research and ultimately present about a social issue of their choice to the grade-level parents. While this year’s nine-person faculty team determined that students would still make a brief Flipgrid video on their topic as a final product, I volunteered to design the week-long mini-course in which they would research and present their topics. I then had to decide what I really, really wanted our students to learn. Since our first run, eight years ago, students have consistently been asked to investigate multiple points of view with regard to their topic, and I have just as consistently been struck with how challenging it is for them to imagine what those viewpoints might be. So, I decided to focus on skills related to searching for and identifying multiple points of view. Specifically, our one requirement for the week was that they identify at least three perspectives on their topic.

Before winter break, students had studied Early Modern Islamic Empires in World History, and had submitted connections they saw among the political history of the Safavids, Mughals, and Ottomans and issues of global health and/or justice in the world today. I took these contemporary connections and, based on the topics each student highlighted, assigned them to groups. Since our time was so short, I framed broad research questions for each group based on their expressed interests. Almost every student articulated a pressing engagement with how personal identifiers played into political leaders’ use of power to privilege or repress different people under their influence, across a range of topics from voting rights to vaccine development to rights of women in Muslim countries (see the outcome of this last topic below).

They had their topics. I had my learning objective. Now, I just had to figure out how to teach the skill set of searching for and identifying multiple perspectives … in 40 minutes or less.

Through a day-long debate with my 20-year-old offspring, we formulated the following approach to identifying multiple perspectives. Though I taught it to 64 students at once in a Zoom meeting, I would definitively say my thinking is still in draft form. Please help me kick the tires and see if it holds up! I would be deeply grateful for critiques and feedback.


It always feels helpful to start with a framing activity that helps to ease students into the complexities we will be tackling in a lesson. In this case, I wanted to get them thinking about how the “government’s job” is not a unitary or settled notion. By adapting a few questions from the (wonderful!) World Values Survey and a recent budget survey done by the city in which our school is located, I asked them to answer four questions about what governments should prioritize.



Though I did briefly show them results to demonstrate that, even in the “room,” we had lots of varying opinions, I cared less about their answers and more about the students contemplating competing priorities.

A bar chart recording responses from class survey demonstrate that everyone has different opinions about the role or priorities of government.

Ultimately, we framed the lesson around the notion of “Priority-based perspectives,” the idea that points of view vary because individuals and organizations must sort through conflicting needs, and some must ultimately take precedence. I drafted a list of what some of these categories of priorities might be:

Image of a slide from class, with a stamp on it saying: DRAFT: Some categories of priorities: moral, economic, logistical, public relations/political, allegiance

The big epiphany I had (though it seems obvious in retrospect) was that my students were never thinking beyond the moral concepts that drove their own interest in their topics. They simply don’t have the life experience to suggest another path for investigation. So, we spent some time discussing that, for example, no matter how strongly you consider rest a moral right, the need to feed and house your family might still require a higher priority than time to rest. Similarly, you may morally believe that everyone has the right of equal access to a COVID vaccine, but we have been witnessing the real logistical challenges of efficient and equitable distribution.

One element that turned out to be pivotally helpful was that this construct moved students away from the binary pro/con approach for identifying perspectives (“Who agrees with me? Smart people. Who has a different opinion? Mean people.”) and instead started their research in a fundamentally different place: “What are the economic considerations of vaccine development? What different priorities might be competing? What are the logistical considerations of vaccine development? What different priorities might be competing with regard to logistical issues?” and so on. It removed their thinking from themselves and their closely held beliefs and allowed them space to be curious about what issues and priorities might exist.

Of course, we reviewed a few key search tips:

1. Pay attention to search terms, which will yield specific POVs:
— For example: Undocumented workers, illegal aliens, birthright citizenship
2. Search for your answer, not your question:
— Think about what you might expect someone to write about a topic and search for that.
— What words might someone use when they are talking about “morals”? How about “economic”? For example: budget, cost, price tag
3. Consider: how might people with the same goals have different priorities that lead to different POVs?
4. Remember to use stepping stone sources:
— Identify expert vocabulary/pertinent search terms that appear in the sources you have read so far. For example: CRISPR, designer babies, genetic engineering
— Who are some stakeholders mentioned in your sources who have points of view on this topic (people, groups, or organizations who care about the issue)? For example:
1.”According to the Department of Justice…”
2. “Emails leaked by the whistleblower”
3. “Professor Arvind Gupta, a researcher at the University of Oklahoma…”

There was one final issue that required addressing in this lesson: what does one do with points of view that do not meet with standards of evidence-based-reasoning? In the past, I have taught finding various political perspectives and a separate lesson on more diverse news consumption generally (finally this year I pointed out to a colleague that selecting sources by left-leaning and right-leaning just left out too many people, and ethnic, religious, and other community news sources needed to be included in any list of sources for reading political news). Yet, I try to balance understanding various perspectives against including harmful or factually incorrect perspectives in the classroom. For example, we do not accept as factual perspectives disproven medical studies (they may be mentioned for influence, but not presented as informational sources). I’ve never quite figured out how to walk that line effectively.

In this lesson, I drew on the World History course theme of historical empathy, and explained that identifying priority-based perspectives is an interstitial step that assists in identifying a range of perspectives; doing so also helps us understand the mechanisms that create structures in our world today, including the persistence of structural inequity. After identifying different priorities, and (potentially) sources that speak from the perspective of those authorities, it is the researcher’s job to evaluate the source (or, as we teach, identify the context and construction of the source’s authority) and determine whether it passes muster in our evidence-based environment.

The faculty for the ninth grade project all agreed that the students’ work this year was quite strong, despite the various emotional challenges everyone faced during our six hours of project time (including the events of January 6, 2021). I was particularly proud of the group that wanted to focus on women in Islam, as they moved themselves beyond a blind critique of the “other” and ended up delving deeply into a complex set of women’s perspectives about being a hijabi.

So, the idea of priority-based perspectives seems to work. Yet, I suspect I am missing (various) pitfalls or have elements lacking clarity. Thoughts?

Ah, Research Season …

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This week, our 5th formers will be completing their U.S. History research papers in lieu of a mid-term exam. As they scramble to finish their product—find one last piece of evidence to support a claim, format their manuscript in Chicago Style, insert footnotes, polish their thesis statement—I find myself with the opportunity to look back over these past two months and reflect on the process. While it takes a village to shepherd and support our students through the process, our work moves them toward what is ultimately a uniquely solitary activity, the act of putting pen to paper, or fingers to keyboard, one that requires they bring together all of the skills and pieces of information covered over the course of this semester that hopefully will result in one cohesive work.

“It’s only a high school research paper.”
—astute APUSH student

In much the same way my students need to grapple with and master the specific skills research requires of them, it’s also necessary for me to think about how I can help them with that process. As educators of secondary school students, I don’t think many of us are under the illusion that our students are truly finding a research gap and entering into the scholarly conversation in a way that will be acknowledged by the academic community at large. This is in no way discounting the fine work many of our students do in their research/writing, but as one of my APUSH students so aptly stated when a colleague was doing the classic deep dive we all do when creating a properly formatted citation, “it’s only a high school research paper.” Yes, yes it is. Somehow looking at it from that perspective has been wonderfully liberating. While my students may not have their work published in peer-reviewed journals (yet!), they do need to be able to read and think deeply and critically about any number of issues throughout their academic career and in their personal life. So, how do we maintain high standards yet keep the paper in its proper perspective and what exactly does keep me up at night thinking about all things research?

Make the Process Visible

Image Credit: University Library System, University of Pittsburgh

The Research Process is one that’s familiar to us all—an iterative process with students moving through the steps on the infographic above until they (finally!) reach the citing, reviewing, and editing finish line. If you’re like me, you probably see at least six or more points when it would be helpful to meet with a class to provide instruction. Depending on a myriad of factors unique to each school, we might have one “boot camp” style instructional session or we might be fortunate enough to meet on a regular basis with a given class.

Flip the Class

Regardless of how much instructional time we have with students, it’s never enough. Our general research LibGuide establishes a common language for students and faculty and provides a general overview of the research process. With links to available resources and the flexibility to embed these in our PowerSchool LMS, flipping lessons can make the instructional time I do have more productive.

The Class-Specific LibGuide

This year I worked with five sections of U.S. History and two sections of APUSH, all writing a long-form paper. My collaboration with these classes ranged from an average of two-three instructional sessions to a high of ten. While more is always better from my vantage point, I work hard to be flexible and adapt to the needs of each faculty. This means I have to plan well in advance to cover essential skills during my face-to-face instructional time. For each research project I collaborate on, I create a unique guide that serves as a home base for students and supports what I cover in class. The U.S. History guide has subject-specific curated resources for primary, secondary, and tertiary sources and additional information on writing process skills. I’m also working on an exciting new project with the AP AB Calculus class on symmetry in nature and their guide supports the exploration of academic as well as online sources. These guides make it possible to curate available resources that help our students develop familiarity with scholarly and trustworthy sources.

Embrace the Basics

Although our incoming 3rd and 4th formers take a semester-long New Student Seminar course which covers study and research skills, I find I still need to stress the basics to our 5th and 6th formers. What is a tertiary source and why can you use it for background information but not quote it or include it in the bibliography? How can a book and journal both be secondary sources, but only one is peer-reviewed? How do you use social media in a scholarly paper? How are we to think about an author’s bias/ point-of-view or their authority? I do use handouts that when finished resemble an annotated bibliography and find they help students record basic bibliographic information with space for relevant quotes and why they support their claims. I try to not overestimate their ability to locate and evaluate information and plan lessons that focus on meta-cognition—encouraging them to think about thinking.

NoodleTools

Oh, where would we be without NoodleTools? Even my most reluctant students eventually come to see the benefit of organizing their research on this platform. The inbox feature allows me to have access to all my students’ projects and be able to work side-by-side with them as they add or evaluate sources. While students love the export to NoodleTools feature on most databases, I see great value in thinking about what goes into the creation of a citation: what type of source is it, where was it found, who is the author, what is the title of the journal, when was it published, etc.—all the questions students need to answer as they add sources manually. With the notecard feature, I see a range of requirements from faculty for students to create notecards on NoodleTools, but I find those students who use the notecard feature generally have a much easier time organizing their outline and keeping quotes and paraphrases attributed to the proper source. Whether required by their teacher or not, I encourage all my students to use the notecard and outline features.

Images showing a student’s exemplary use of the notecard feature

Make Personal Connections

One of the best changes to this year’s instruction has been the addition of conferencing thanks to two faculty who required their students meet with me to discuss their papers. To organize this as simply as possible, students signed up “old school” for a time to meet via a clipboard at the front desk. We have other sign-up clipboards, so this made the most sense for the sake of consistency. These reference interviews were an opportunity for me to connect with students on a personal basis, ask questions that encouraged critical thinking and helped them to clarify their topic or thesis. It was also a time to offer them support on anything they requested from finding sources to formatting their manuscript. Asking students how I might help them encourages them to think more critically about where they are in the process and identify what they need to move forward. I see these conversations as a way to model how they might enter into the larger research conversation.

Our “old school” sign-up sheet gets the job done!

The Research Process is Messy

Another benefit of these one-on-one sessions is for me to be able to share the messiness of the whole process. Whether searching for sources, developing a thesis, or finding that right piece of evidence to support a claim, my experience has been that students generally believe research is a librarian’s superpower, not something we ever fail at or struggle with. So when I meet with students, it’s not to impress them with finding the “just right” source, it’s to show them the search process can be totally frustrating and you constantly have to regroup and refine search terms. To help them develop their search muscle, we identify basic search terms together and then brainstorm how to expand or limit our search depending on the results. Because I have a large monitor, these one-on-one sessions allow students to easily see and follow along as we work through advanced search strategies – something not easily accomplished with group instruction. Since mid-December, I’ve had the opportunity to meet with over 70 students, many of those repeat visits with no mandate from the teacher. Connecting with students at this level has enriched my experience as their research librarian and I hope it has enriched their research experience, as well.

Starting in the Shallows

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I’m writing today to share some reflections on attempting to create a set of non-examples of a project for students at my school. I was approached by a Chemistry teacher with a program that he had used in the past – a project about Glass. I really love the idea of the product from this project – a self-contained presentation, audio elements, high quality visuals. It is a target rich opportunity for co-instruction and individual student coaching to find resources.

I had also been given one class period to come in and offer some direct instruction to all classes – they are mixed ability students with individual 1-1 devices, but as a grade have not had any Library Instruction yet this year – so I wanted to use the time I had well to promote in-house resources as well as instruction…

I then fell into a small pit of despair – with one class period, and multiple objectives – how can I sell this cohort of students on vetted resources AND talk about research skills.

To pull out of this – I began throwing out possible ideas through twitter. While microblogging maybe has lost some of its luster as a generalizable tool, it is a helpful tool for me to get started with writing, teaching, and doing. And, sure enough, I threw out an idea that was then picked up by some other AISL-ers (Many thanks to Dave and Chris for follow up questions).

I wanted to focus on promoting the collection by creating a non-example of research. My initial thought was to create a google slide presentation of the first three hits on google and scrape the data off of them and ask students to evaluate how good a job this did of entertaining and informing them. I’ve done this in the past with non-examples of high quality presentations (THIS example of Tycho Brahe’s life in three minutes is my favorite previous lesson) I veered from this plan a bit, because I realized there might be a more dramatic way of nudging students further a field.

This Fall, our community began reading Artificial Intelligence in Education by Fadel, Holmes and Bialik, as an all staff read for a retreat day. The book covers a broad survey of ways that machine learning algorithms and automated assessments and learning environments might shift the classroom. It’s not a book that you could turn around and use immediately in the classroom, but it forced me to consider some tools that I often forget about – the voice assistant on my students phones.

So, to start this lesson, I picked out volunteers in the class to ask Siri ‘Tell me about Glass Art’ – while I displayed the front page from Wikipedia. I like displaying the front page of Wikipedia when starting to talk about research, because it allows me to verbally walk through criteria of usefulness for an assignment – some pages are better written than others – the History of Glass Art – And sure enough, Siri began reading that Wikipedia page out loud to the class.

The next piece of instruction was a reflective writing Think Pair and Share about how well this resource would allow them to answer ‘How’ they knew the facts presented by the article – this Wikipedia entry is pretty general without specific citations in the early paragraph.

I then walked them through google’s first hit on History of Glass – historyofglass.com

Pretty standard informational site with no citations or visible author. It took some prodding to have students articulate what might be problematic about the site, I include the image because it matches many of the sources that students find when searching the shallow end of the internet – it’s information without context. I then tried to walk them through finding who or why this information existed.

My go to first step for a long time has been to find the about section and unpack what content marketing company has paid a writer – no luck there, so I tried the contact page.

Also vague – so I jumped laterally to the privacy policy – because, as I mentioned in my instruction, information doesn’t just ‘end up’ on the internet- – someone put it there. The page doesn’t have any visible ads – which had my privacy self SPOOKED (I like to feel like I understand WHY the author of a site wants me there).

Nothing really there except normal google analytics. 

The rest of the lesson ended up being focused more on finding music for presentations – a different topic than I want to talk about here, but I’ll share this symbaloo of resources I curated for my students for the project.

What tools are you using to interrupt the automated process of information retrieval? David Loertscher wrote about banning the bird project years ago, but on some level if your classroom teachers want a bird project – how can you use the automated tools to help the classes and students produce something extra? I close with a recommendation. The design podcast, 99% Invisible had an episode about Pepper farming that reflected a bit on the difficulty of designing a machine that could pick pepper plants efficiently. Machines have difficulty with the complex task of pulling the soft vegetable off the hard vine, they tend to either harvest too little, or destroy what they have harvested. They are not good at doing lateral thinking and problem solving to find the harvest. I think that our students need to own this distinctly human skill at problem solving

I’m spending this year thinking about what humans are good at that automation and machine learning alone can’t do. I’m starting my information literacy lesson in the shallows of the internet to make the case for making a deeper dive. What have you been teaching this week?

Curiosity killed the… wait, what?

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The Curious Classroom by Harvey Daniels (2017), aptly subtitled 10 Structures for Teaching with Student-Directed Inquiry, is one of those professional books you can read on the beach, in a busy airport, on the train, or anywhere else, really. It’s practical and conversational, with plenty of real-life examples, photographs of classrooms, and handy sketchnotes at the end of each chapter.

Read this book: If you are a lower or middle school librarian looking to boost curiosity and wonder at your school, wanting to let students take control and run with their own interests and ideas rather than focusing on the same old research project (is it birds this year? or animals in general?), grab a friendly and collaborative teacher partner and read this book together! This study guide will be gold as you’re reading together. 

Having read this book recently for our Board Book discussion at the AISL conference last week, I’m left with so many nuggets of wisdom and little ideas to embrace students’ curiosity. Here are a few that I’d like to implement ASAP:

Idea: Why don’t I have a Wonder Wall in the library (Google it with a -oasis unless you’d rather listen to the song…)?! The setup is easy — a blank bulletin board with the words “Wonder Wall” and sticky notes or slips of paper for students to tack on. That’s such a simple way to validate and explore students’ questions!

Idea: I feel similarly about Genius Hour — this seems like old news, but I’ve finally found a way to make it work in our lower school library. We have scheduled time throughout the year for Friday afternoon classes that generally last three weeks called Interest Groups. I’ve led Library Helpers, Finger Knitting, Book Budgets, and a variety of other crafty and library-related groups, but I’ve never tried a Genius Hour. And this would be PERFECT for this structured time because students can choose to be in the group and spend their afternoons exploring and researching anything they wanted to! I love having small group research help time and feel like this would be such a natural way to support students.

Nugget: This tip (followed by an example) really made me reflect on my own practice:

With inquiry projects we sometimes spend too much time setting things up. And if we slow down too much, kids can lose energy and start complaining.

Though the example in the book seemed entirely too-smooth-to-be-true (in less than 5 minutes, students wrote down what they already know about the topic and questions they have), I know that one of my growing edges is to let go of some control and let kids start the work without so much frontloading. They’re going to stumble and make mistakes and get frustrated, and that’s okay! That’s real life!

The real struggle that I have been having with this kind of open, student-directed inquiry, especially for my young students, is that their interests are SO MUCH more complex than the texts written for them. Their questions are just not easily answered in a book at their reading level. So, we talk a lot about the research process, about the kinds of sources we have available to us and about which one would give us the best answer. We document our research process, noting the hard parts, and work towards making meaning of the information we find. This book validated that process for me, assuring me that it is, in fact, messy work, and if it’s not, then we’re not doing it right!

Hyper Docs for Hyper Connectivity: a librarian and teacher collaboration for information literacy

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As librarians many of us maintain websites, course management sites, or libguides so that the library resources are accessible to our school population within the systems they currently use, but I am always wondering how frequently they are used outside our presence. So every time I receive a request for collaboration with a teacher I always want to learn the media, apps, and programs they are using so that I can adopt the protocols the students are immersed in to make the experience is as seamless as possible. Recently, a 5th grade science teacher remarked about how her students struggle when they do internet searches for topics in her science program. So we talked about ways to help this age group be more independent when searching online. We knew we wanted to provide students with a plan and approach that they can revisited and reuse.  I had mentioned to her that I had developed a checklist and document to help older student navigating the infobesity of the internet, but that I wanted to scaffold a similar guide for younger students for the continuity of the research program. Through this process I learned from her that she uses HyperDocs with students continuously as they work through the concepts in her course. She shared a example one with me. So I could develop research and information literacy concept in the medium most useful to the processes of the daily classroom.  

So what is a HyperDoc?

Selene Willis, the teacher I was collaborating with, described that it is a guided practice in digital form. She operates her class in an inquiry process so the HyperDocs she designs become the living, breathing “textbook” of the course. She shares which document they need to work on that day. It contains directions, links, and response tasks.  The students go to multiple sources online to learn the science concepts they need, but in a scaffolded way. I want to be clear that it is not an old worksheet dressed up and on display on a shiny screen; it is actually adaptive to the pace and focus of class. With mindful design they steer students in higher level thinking processes. Incorporating HyperDocs works wells for our middle school because we are a Google app school with a one-to-one iPad program at that level. She designs them in Google Docs, but the students import them through their Notability app so they can draw, doodle, as well as type answers. I loved witnessing this parallel process with the research process I share with students. In fact, the concept should be familiar to librarians because for years we have been masters of sharing links. Even before learning this terminology, I reflected that I had been doing an iteration of this with the Google Docs I share with students anyway. Which lead me to ask?

So what makes HyperDocs different from our Libguides and shared Google Docs?

One major difference I observed from Selene’s example is the design layout. Great attention is made to the readability and graphical interface of the document. I also noticed that Willis choreographs the engagement into the HyperDocs; directions, clarifications at the onset, individual inquiry into the links and reading material, and then a whole class return to sharing understandings. So I was excited to adapt some of my own approaches to this medium and process.

Crafting a Library HyperDoc

In tailoring my online research checklist to a 5th grade audience I wanted to use graphics that 5th graders relate to in their daily lives. I notice that the game four square is still alive and well in middle school as it was for me. This lead me to a new phrasing I use with middle schoolers to help them with search terms and the early parts of research. I used the image of a four square court as the area for them to generate the search terms before ever going to a website or database link. And I tell them to four-square their search terms.

The students fill the boxes with search terms and check off the list. My next checkboxes make them think about where they go online prior to them going there. This is one of the best features of a HyperDoc because you can build in habits of mind or nudge them into behaviors of good research strategy. Another reason to adopt similar formats of teachers is that now students have this process in with their daily work and links back to the school library page .

Since I had been working with fact-checking in the upper school I wanted to parse it down and start introducing it to younger students. So I put a fact-checking machine in the HyperDoc at a level that I thought would make sense for 5th grade students. I also was able to give them specific fact-checking sites for science.

Finally, the rest of my session with the students was having them use the library page with databases for their age group and add information to their HyperDoc. Ms. Willis was excited to know about some of the resources that would work for her students. I was happy share the digital resources the library has that pair nicely with their HyperDocs. I think the students were more receptive to my tips because it was in a procedure and format they recognize. While it is faster to share a regular Google Doc for library lessons I found that thinking through the imagery for the HyperDoc heightened my awareness of how students approach research.

Resources  on HyperDocs

Hyperdoc Handbook

https://www.cultofpedagogy.com/hyperdocs/

Librarians using HyperDocs– In researching for this article I stumbled on these librarians that have written about HyperDocs in a library setting.

http://ourlivelylibrary.weebly.com/blog/the-librarians-hyperdoc

http://blogs.slj.com/neverendingsearch/2017/04/18/hyperdocs-and-the-teacher-librarian/#comments

 

Fighting Fake News-International Fact-Checking Day on the Horizon

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http://www.factcheckingday.com/

Library at the Poynter Institute photo credit: Tom Cawthon

Many of us in AISL have shared our lessons and experiences about how we are addressing research and information literacy in the face of the fake news media buzz. I wanted to revisit the topic again because of the ongoing development of this story. I want to reiterate that I see it as an opportunity for librarians demonstrate leadership as information literacy experts and bridge the gap of media studies that is often lacking at the secondary level.

With the recent examples of fake news that has been revealed the term is being thrown around casually in the media. I fear we may be too cavalier in its use. Again this gives us a strong reason to continue to work with teachers to teach source evaluation critically. There have been cases of politicians, talk radio hosts, and news/opinion shows crying out fake news when they dislike a news story. So just as we teach students to affirm the credibility of sources we also must teach students to discredit claims of fake news that are actually real. There has been an undermining of trust in many of our traditional media sources, but if we teach students healthy skepticism and give them the tools of critical analysis they will be empowered to make informed decisions and not take any statement or story at face value. Since my last post, “Librarians Being Proactive in “Post-truth” World” and David Wee’s follow up resource list post I have continued to follow and collect resources in this ongoing focus on fake news.

Through a triangulation of the many resources one organization appears frequently. Many articles point to Politfact.org operated by the Tampa Bay Times which has received a Pulitzer prize for its work on fact-checking U.S. politics. The common denominator to Politifact and the Tampa Bay Times is the Poynter Institute which is a worldwide leader in media studies and educating professional reporters which also happens to be in my backyard of St. Petersburg, FL. Recently, Facebook has turned to the Poynter Institute for consultation on addressing fake news in social media. With this world renowned resource in my hometown I could not help but reach out to them to see if some of their expertise could be useful to secondary education.

I reached out to some of the professors and affiliates at Poynter and several responded. Through email they shared that many of them had been thinking about how some of their work could reach a younger audience since most of their work is with working reporters or college students studying journalism. I was then able to meet Alexios Mantzarlis because he was actively working on a lesson on fact-checking to share with high school level students. I was excited to share how at the secondary level many librarians are teaching about source credibility and fact-checking since there are not mainstream media classes at the high school level. Alexios Mantzarlis’s expertise is in international fact-checking. He informed me that he and other professional fact-checkers along with the following organizations from around the world including PolitiFact, Channel 4, Chequeado, Pagella Politica, the American Press Institute are organizing an International Fact-Checking Day to be on April 2nd, 2017. I wanted to share the outline of the day since it pertains to many of the conversations we have had about teaching information literacy. Here is an overview of the day:

  1. A lesson plan on fact-checking for high school teachers. Recent studies indicate that high school students are digitally native but still largely unable to evaluate whether sources of information online are factual or biased. The lesson plan will be downloadable and translated in as many languages as we are able to reach.
  2. A factcheckathon exhorting readers to flag fake stories on Facebook. The IFCN will populate a list of debunked fake viral stories and encourage Facebook users to flag them as fake through the new flagging procedure announced by the social network in December. The hope is both to harness the power of the crowd to ‘clean up’ the social network and engender an attitude of intolerance towards verifiably false posts aiming to deceive. Given the new studies from Reddit, it would be interesting to see if we can do something there, too.
  3. A “hoax-off” among top debunked claims. We will collect some of the most notable false claims and fake news debunked around the world from fact-checkers and host an interactive game to elect the worst hoax of the past year.
  4. A map of global activities. Poynter will be encouraging the more than 100 fact-checking organizations that are active around the world to organize events promoting fact-checking and verification in formats appropriate to their political and societal contexts. We will list all such events on an interactive map on our site that will help market the events and encourage people to attend.

This is a great way to outreach with your teachers to continue to teach research skills. Since this has a global perspective the day also fits with global studies and Model United Nations programs at your school. I am constantly looking for ways to collaborate with my faculty and a sanctioned day like International Fact-Check Day adds credibility to my outreach. The international fact check day website is now live at http://www.factcheckingday.com/.

 

With a Little Help from My Friends

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The start of the new calendar year has been hectic indeed.  Our amazing assistant librarian is off on maternity leave, and while a former student library proctor turned library school graduate student is now interning with us, we just don’t have the same amount of help that we did before.

However, we what we do have are the fabulous ideas that you all have given me over the last semester for things to do with our classes. And this blog has been especially valuable to me as Christina and I have been revamping our World History classes and I have been taking on an embedded librarian project in regular US history.

In particular, I thought I would talk about two suggestions that I used and how they turned out and then ask for your thoughts and suggestions.  In my next post I will detail the entire six days of research that we were given for the World History project and how that went and what changes we made, but we are just at the tail end of it and we still need to finish and then take stock and do a lessons learned.

Here are the two lessons that we used from your suggestions:

  1. Virtual Search Results (Or You Are My Search Result! Or or Sit Down!! No, Stand Up!) from Katie Archambault’s post on Boolean Searching
  2. Paraphrasing with Adele (or Katy Perry) by Allie Bronston’s post on the Mini Lesson in 6th Grade Science

Virtual Search Results

I really loved Katie’s description of this exercise and I really enjoyed making my 9th graders act out my google search results.  While I had great fun with my kids doing this exercise, Christina met some resistance with her students on it (mainly eye rolls and some comments about being made to do squats).  Some students felt they were a bit too old to be playing “games.”

Essentially, in the virtual search result, you have your class be the Google search bar and whatever phrase you write on the board, they need to enact by standing up or sitting down if they embody it.  I put the words NARROW, BROADEN, AND, OR on the board and then began.

“If you are a student, stand up.” Faculty sits down.

“AND if you are student and you are wearing shorts stand up.” (Otherwise sit down. 😎

“AND if you have on glasses continue to stand up.” (Continue on until you have one person.)

At this point, we usually have a nice cheer for the one person, and I can make a comment about finding that one amazing article.  I can also say a word or two about how MORE keywords lead to NARROWER search results (point to board) and that you don’t have to use just one or two keywords.  More can be a good thing.

Chart the keywords/search results on board (venn diagram).

Then we move on to OR.

For or, we did eyes.  If you have green eyes, stand up.  Everyone sit down.  If you have brown eyes, stand up.  Then, if you have green eyes OR brown eyes, stand up.  HMMM.  What does the room look like now.  Discuss.

Chart on board with Venn diagram.

Then we had them move on to use their keywords with and/or and do at least three searches in the databases with and/or and bookmark sources that they found interesting.  If they found a source they liked, peruse it and take a note on it.

Paraphrasing

Way back when I first read Allie’s intriguing post, all she mentioned was that she had used Adele’s song “Hello” to teach paraphrasing to her middle schoolers.  I thought that sounded like great fun.  I also thought it sounded perfect!  Here are my three M’s of paraphrasing (stolen from our alliterative Mr. Ramadan, World History teacher extraordinaire):

  1. Minimal (make it concise)
  2. Mine (put it in your own words)
  3. Meaning (keep the original idea)

I mean, right off the bat, Hello, so easy, right:

Original: Hello

Students: Hi, Yo, Salutations, Greetings

I love that we ALWAYS get salutation as an answer.  Now, less IS more! And I can always say that salutations is not minimal.  It isn’t concise.  Hi or Yo is much better.  Then, you can pair students up and have them do the next couple of lines and then present them to the class.  See if they meet the 3 M’s. I find that Adele’s song is great for ease of use and ability to have two ideas in a line that is easy to identify and paraphrase. We also used Roar by Katy Perry.  I didn’t think it was as successful.  Perhaps with 11th or 12th graders as her concepts were a bit more advanced and she jumps in right away with them. What are your thoughts?  Other songs?

Right now, Christina and I are having a discussion about whether we should have rows for every sentence like you see in the document below or if we should just give them the lyrics and let them have the ability to combine lines naturally.  She feels that line combination might occur more readily without the artificial boundaries imposed by the table.  What are your thoughts?

I would love to have a class paraphrase the whole song and then karaoke it! We quit after the first five lines.  Only so much time in high school.

Paraphrasing Exercise – hello by adele

Conclusion

We also used David Wee’s info on notetaking, but I am going to save that info for my longer post on our actual 6-day unit.  Until then, think about what songs you would use for paraphrasing.  Are you ready to stand up and do a virtual search result? Let me know how it goes.

And most importantly, thank you to Katie, Allie and David and to all of you I just haven’t borrowed from yet.  Don’t worry.  I will soon.  Because we all have something to offer! Make sure you share! Comment!

Librarians Being Proactive in “Post-truth” World

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Additional  contributers Cathy Rettberg and Erinn Salge

“Child Trafficking Ring Tied to Hillary Clinton Campaign”*

“Russians Hacked Democratic National Committee Emails to Lead Voters To Trump”**

“Miracle Herbal Remedy to Cure Cancer”***

So many of our news stories sound like sensational news. Remember that ice-breaker game two truths and a lie. In today’s media landscape of sharing information rapidly it seems that the ratio has turned to two lies to a truth, and our students are struggling to tell the difference. There has been a flood of fake news, conspiracy theories, and click-bait, etc.; especially in this election cycle, but thankfully there has also been a host of articles drawing attention to the critical need to reveal the lies and teach our students analytical evaluation skills. Many of us in the library world and specifically several librarians in the AISL group have been discussing and sharing ideas about addressing this through our role as information literacy leaders. I am sharing some of the links that have bounced around and some of the lessons we generated to continue to the do the work we always do but in this new context.

In this “Post-Truth” climate we have the potential to reinvigorate our lessons of information literacy, sources awareness, and website evaluation skills. There are several layers of information literacy to delve into around the recent media buzz calling attention to the recent “fake news”; I see an opportunity to collaborate with subject area teachers on topics like identifying bias, analyzing authority, evaluating websites,and fact-checking etc. There is a way to reach every subject area and share the librarian lens of critical and discerning approaches to sources. Here are several links I found valuable in shaping my thoughts on the lesson I delivered last week:

Truth, truthiness, triangulation: A news literacy toolkit for a “post-truth” world by Joyce Valenza

I refer to Valenza’s work frequently. She frames the complex topic thoroughly and categorically. There are ample examples, great tips for students,and an exhaustive list of resources. The vocabulary list is a great tool to approach a social studies teacher to create collaborative lesson together.

False, Misleading, Clickbait-y, and/or Satirical “News” Sources by Melissa Zimdars

Consider looking to professors of media studies since it is their concentration and expertise. A local professor of communications tipped me off to this document that went viral on Facebook feeds. Valenza also includes her on her list, but I am drawing attention to it because it helped me fill the gap in current new media tips. It is straightforward and accessible for students to understand. Additionally, another AISL librarian shared a libguide search of college librarians also updating their sites and lessons as well.

Students Need Our Help Detecting Fake News by  Frank W. Baker

This example was posted in Middle Web. It is another variation of the examples above but I like the focus towards the middle school arena to help middle school teachers and librarians scaffold news media literacy to their students. There are numerous more, but Valenza’s site covers many more.

Website Evaluation and News Media Literacy Lessons and Presentation

With the many general discussions about the topics several AISL librarians shared the work that we are doing and gave me permission to share so that we have some specific examples:

I’ll start with mine because I can explain my process with it.

Evaluating Sources: Luck of the Draw or Skilled Play-Lesson by Courtney Walker delivered in a social studies class specifically the 9th grade Global Studies with Mr. Daniel Asad at Shorecrest Preparatory School.

Mr. Asad started the class by referring to the recent Pizzagate situation that had happened over the past weekend. He used this example to show how “fake news” can have dire consequences in extreme cases. This set the stage for me to share the importance of critical analysis skills with web resources. This lesson starts generally with looking at sources on a spectrum of scholarly sources to the sensational. It is not a stand alone lesson on news media literacy, but a retooling of the process of web evaluation with the inclusion of the tips to identify of fake news and current updates. I adapted resources that I had used before along with a current article I came across in Knowledge Quest to put recent fake news proliferation in a broader context of website evaluation. We planned for one class period, but I found us running out of time at the  end of class. We also delved some into bias, click-bait, and conspiracy theories, but only scratched the surface– a follow up lesson is possible to continue the discussion. This is in a document form that was projected and shared with the students. After going over the document and discussing the concepts students were given a checklist sheet which was the “card” they had been dealt. Links to these “cards”/websites is linked on the document underneath the image of the cards. I didn’t have those linked or projected during the lesson- I have only added for others to see the handout and the sliding scale of the websites. I repeatedly stressed that even though we are using these charts that these are not hard fast rules, but tools to filter through the many shades of gray in sources.

Link to Evaluating Sources Lesson

Reporting the News: Is it Real or Fake? Lesson By Cathy Rettberg, Head Librarian, Menlo School Atherton, CA (reprint permission from shared email exchange)

The following example comes from librarian Cathy Rettberg in an email discussion with AISL Librarians about news media literacy. The opening timeline of twitter posts coupled with the number of times the tweet was viewed and shared illustrates the how quickly misinformation is spreading.  Included is her powerpoint and the active lesson her students completed to embody the reporter role and spread their “news.” Make sure you check out their final headlines at the end.

In her words,“Yesterday I did a lesson in 8th grade. We looked at the Eric Tucker story that was outlined in the NYT, talked about fake news in historical perspective (propaganda), discussed the echo chamber concept, clickbait, how to look at bias in news sites. I had them evaluate news sites by looking at coverage of the Dakota Access Pipeline, then place their site on a grid (photo attached). Finally I gave them the “facts” about a made up 8th grade ice cream protest (students walked out, disrupted 6th grade, teachers got angry, MS director came out and smoothed the waters). The students then had to write a news headline about that event in the style of the news website they had investigated. It was fun! And their headlines showed they really understood the concept. It’s so important for each of us to do this with our students, in some way.”

Link to Reporting the News Lesson

“Some of their headlines, if you want to use them:

The Blaze: Childish 8th Grade Protesters Disrupt School Environment for Ice Cream

WSJ: Student Protesters Put on Hold by Middle School Principal

Daily Beast: Students Fight for their Rights!

NYT: Peaceful Protesters and the Battle for Ice Cream”

News Literacy:Truthiness and the truth and everything in between presentation by Erinn Salge Head Librarian Morristown-Beard School (reprint permission from shared email exchange)

Finally, hot off the presses from Erinn Salge. Erinn started the email thread that many of us chimed in on because it was on our radar or we were in the process of designing our own lessons. Just today she shared the powerpoint that she presented to her upper school. While many of us have the example through our email I wanted to also cross-post here for future reference and because it is relevant to the discussion. She has provided both slides and her notes for others to see how she tackled this contemporary topic. She defines some important new terms in news media literacy and has clear steps for students to use to identify false news.

Link to News Literacy Presentation

Link to New Literacy Notes for Presentation

I am grateful to the dedicated librarians that are always seeking ways to inform their staff and students through constant engagement and outreach to their community. And while we have always taught careful inquiry into all kinds of media staying abreast of the new forms and iterations of this skillset and sharing it is vital to our learning communities. I hope this post is just a start, and I invite others to comment and share the ways you have retooled your own lessons. I know there were many others on the email thread as while as others of you in the trenches covering this as we speak. There were rumblings that there may be another post coming up that might scaffold it to a younger audience so that this information might reach all levels of instruction ( Wee might see that real soon?).

Thank you, David Wee, for noticing— in a perfect storm of propaganda, perfidy, and the press just yesterday the Washington Post shared the article, “After Comet Ping Pong and Pizzagate, teachers tackle fake news,”  about how educators are responding to “fake news.” Because I had shared a snippet of my lesson on Twitter last week a reporter picked up some of my lesson as well as other teachers around the country addressing #fakenews. I am honored, but more importantly thankful that the reporter included a librarian to show how important our role is in fostering critical users of information in our schools and communities.

Here are some of the books I have read to inform me-

Using Sources Effectively: Strengthening Your Writing and Avoiding Plagiarism by Robert A. Harris

A Field Guide to Lies: Critical Thinking in the Information Age by Daniel J. Levitin

UnSpun:Finding Facts in a World of Disinformation by Brooks Jackson and Kathleen Hall Jamieson

Blur: How to Know What’s True in the Age of Information Overload by Bill Kovach and Tom Rosenstiel

Additionally, these are some of the articles that I have bookmarked/outlined in Diigo that I am continuing to collect on this topic. Digital Bookmarks on Website Evaluation, News Media Literacy, Fake News

*Revealed as fake news recently known as Pizzagate or Comet Ping Pong because armed man was about to act on this fake news story.

**Still under investigation by the FBI and CIA to verify the truth

***Recent news story in which a man named Adeniji created a fake website and office to collect money on fraudulent claims of a miracle herbal remedy for cancer.