Research and Information Literacy Skills

My head was spinning by the end of class today. We looked at so many different apps that have great possibilities for use in the classroom. I definitely need more time to digest all of the information. After the whirl wind afternoon of apps, I am trying to take a step back and remember our discussion from this morning about critical thinking and information literacy. We received several great resources this morning but my favorite site was Kathy Schrock's page "Literacy in the Digital Age."I think that there is enough information on this one webpage to keep me busy all summer! I definitely plan to spend some quality time there.

As I start to think about the upcoming school year, I want to figure out some ways to include the topic of information literacy into my curriculum. I know that my students can definitely benefit from more instruction on learning to evaluate websites for reliability. It is easy to fall into the trap of believing things that we read online without taking the time to investigate things fully. I have received countless emails from friends over the years warning of imminent dangers on the Internet which turned out to be hoaxes. It is not only our students who are easily duped at times. That being said, it is difficult for me to decide exactly how I will implement this topic. I like to stay in the target language as much as possible during class because students need a lot of comprehensible input in Spanish. I have been searching around a bit and I have come up with a few articles written in Spanish that deal with the subject of  evaluating the credibility of a website. I am planning to gather a few more and then have students choose an article to prepare for a class discussion. Then I think that one activity that I want to try is to have my AP Spanish students film some public service announcements on the topic of information literacy that I could then show to my lower level classes.