week 7

This week I spent approximately 1.5 hours with student going over searching the internet sites for types of information that can be useful for studies. Session took place while at home using various search engines and criteria. Student has tendency to find the first material to pop up and use information in his research without checking credentials.

Student needs to come up facts and information using the web to come up with report on prohibition (a topic of his choice). I explained how Wikipedia worked and showed him that the information found is usually correct but not always. Student sometimes wants to take shortcuts which usually result in in accurate accounts of actual events. I gave him a project to find 5 sources with one needing to be from an academic search engine, two from an online news article and two from any online site offering information on the event. The results that came back from the five sources he collected were that two of the five sources were different. He did not know which one to use so I asked him to find at least one more source to see if made any difference in the equation. I feel that he learned how to objectively look at information, research and by finding more information that matches with each other in the case of a report or essay he was able to adequately give and write about factual events.

One of the main problems today with web searches is that there is so many open source sites that allow people to add in information that younger kids find what they are looking for and take it for truth without searching further. The key is to show how students can search more accurately and find differences in opinion and be able to weed out falsities found on websites.

I believe that our tutoring centered around the create an argument article in the way we took information and was able to find accurate and inaccurate information and use only the what pertained to the assignment.