Reflective Searching

After reading through all the material I couldn't wait to try the Google Challenge. Since I'm a history teacher I choose to go through the history questions; took time to think about some of the questions (I don't teach all the topics covered all the time.). However if I stop and look at the questions through the eyes of my students ages 14-18 year old, things would be totally different. 

There are many factors that play a part in answering the questions for students would be: age of student, history classes taken and interest in history to name a few. One of the questions that I looked at said the oldest signer of the Declaration of Independence didn't like the national emblemed chosen and would have replaced it with what? Be a teacher my mind instantly goes to a list of who all signed the Declaration of Independence, then I attempt to gage their ages. Once I've done that I think about what would be considered the national emblemed and what would someone have thought was better. I easily figured out the older signer was Ben Franklin and the emblem as the bald eagle, at that point I got stuck. 

This is where I decided to do just as my students would do and just start Googling. Most students wouldn't copy the whole question and put it into the search bar, instead they would start looking up other national emblemed ideas or anything close to "save time". When I searched "alternative national emblem symbols for the United States" I got the following suggestions:

  • national symbols from around the world
  • national state symbols
  • national symbols and icons
  • symbols of the US
  • national symbol ideas

Based on my results saying students search exactly what I did most would become frustrated and just put down any answer without it making sense or even being able to explain their answer.

Granted a couple of students may come up with the correct answer with is actually a turkey, but probably only those that actually copied the whole question in the search bar and if they took the time to read through the different search results. We all know students they want to take the first answer that comes up and just be done with the work; problem with that is they aren't actually learning the material they are just practicing how to search stuff on the internet. 

If I stop and think about it at times I'm as guilty as my students just doing a quick search and taking whatever down for an answer and many times that has come back to haunt me. In the future I need to be better about using the different search methods we saw in the video "12 Cool Google Search Tricks....", by doing this is would help save me time and may help me element any wrong answers. 

Comments

  1. Sara BrandMay 23, 2021 at 3:26 PM

    I thought the exact same thing! My 15 year old would have copied and pasted the whole question in the search bar without doing what you did, which is thinking about your prior knowledge first. I do wonder to what extent critical thinking skills are being diminished by the lack of need to use their prior knowledge to find information.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Jen TaylorMay 26, 2021 at 7:55 PM

      I totally get that. I see that in my own 6th grader with his math and even spelling, he doesn't really need to remember how to spell because he has spell check and with math he's got a calculator. These are my son's excuses and I can't totally disagree sadly.

      Delete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Letting Go

I had two immediate thoughts after reading Grant Wiggins, "Great Teaching Means Letting Go" blog; first  was that I really struggle with this with my own kids with stuff at home and second I'm such a Type A personality that it would cause me so much stress to do this in the classroom.  Everyone thinks that teaching high school students is so much easier than elementary because they need less "hand holding" and that's really the furthest from the truth, in reality it's about the same it's just different type of help they need. For reference I teach all four grades (9-12) in high school "regular" 9th grade world history, "honors" 10th world history 2, and "IB" social & cultural anthropology. At the beginning of the year I spend the first week really going on the course work, expectations and how to do everything. I provide explicit instructions, a rubric and student examples for assignments yet with my 9th graders I a
Read more

Inquiry Based Learning.....

Image
Part 1: I tell my students and coworkers often that education in California is way different than it was teaching in Georgia. Everything from how teachers go about becoming a teacher, to the set up of schools and even the way we teach. On of the biggest change for me was learning to use the standards as a guide and that's it as compared to when I taught in Georgia the standards were like the Bible there was no deviating from them.  For me how I'd define Inquiry Based Learning is much like I teach my class (example below) but basically the students are advised of the main (required) topic - think of it like the umbrella and then they help pick/decide what we learn under that topic (the rain drops). Often times this and does vary from class to class because each set of students is different. Once the topics are picked and discussed we work as a class to come up with a research question or questions that we want to learn about. Then I take the research questions and plan the lesso
Read more

Reflections on Fluency

 As a history teacher I was drawn to the two videos about fake news and misinformation as these are topics that get discussed in my class on a daily basis, and it also helped that one of the articles was along the same line.  In the first video clip: Endless Curiosity: The Source of Fake News, it was a super short that got right to the point about how fake news spreads. One point that I took from it that I'll be sharing with my students is that information overload contributes/makes us share junk. I not only talk to my students about this but I also have to make sure that I'm mindful of it myself, that I'm checking things before I share and or post information. As an activity when talking about fake news I have my students pick a topic, it can be whatever they choose and then have to keep a record of how often it comes up in their social media for one week; at the end students are usually shocked by their numbers.  In the next video TED Talk: Why People Fall for Misconcepti
Read more