QUALITY SITES

Emily Koch OC
I'm Emily Koch. I teach at Westside...
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Emily Koch Social Studies/Westside Collaborative, New York City
...Collaborative in New York City, and I teach sixth and eighth grade. Is media something you can always trust? Is all this media that you're looking at and reading, is it always true? Is it always real? Today's lesson is all about going into a website and figuring out if this is something that you can use for research. If this is something you can get facts from or if this is a website that is not as trustworthy. I want you to go once again to a clean sheet in your notebooks. And I want you now to title this sheet, "Media Vocab." This lesson will be consistent with the common core with the, really with the critical thinking. And they're being asked to use their evaluation skills, use their analysis skills and to really go in and read a piece and look at a piece of media and a piece of writing and evaluate its worth. I have three words. The first word is evaluate. We're going to start with just defining some basic terms.
Alaysia VO/OC
Evaluate kind of means like what you think about something.
Emily Koch VO/OC
It's like what you think about something, so.
Male Child With Black Hair OC/VO
Evaluate, like it has the word value inside of it.
Emily Koch VO/OC
Yes, yes. That's exactly right. It's to figure out the value of something. I want to see if you can figure out what trustworthy means now.
Kayla VO/OC
I think trustworthy means like you have
that trust with somebody.
Emily Koch OC
This idea of trust?
Kayla OC
Yeah.
Emily Koch VO
Okay.
Alaysia OC
And like they're worthy to keep a secret.
Emily Koch VO/OC
They're worthy of your trust. Last word I don't know. Let's give it a shot. If you don't know it, that's okay. The word is biased. What do you think biased means? Yeah, Kayla.
Kayla OC
It's like you're sure of yourself. I don't know.
Emily Koch VO/OC
It's very much like sure of yourself. It's like you're very, it's like a very one-sided opinion. It's just that that's the opinion that matters. It's that one-sided opinion. So you guys have a task. So many schools are switching over to having school all year round.
Male Child #1 VO
No.
Male Child In Red Shirt OC
I'm not coming in the summer.
Emily Koch OC
Even in the summer.
Male Child in Gray Shirt VO
No, no. No break or anything?
Emily Koch OC
Take a look up here. So here's your task. You need to go online and you need to find information from Miss Retunda and you need to persuade her of your opinion on this matter. I can only guess what it is. Their task is going to be to go in and ask themselves, "If I need to convince my principal that I don't want year round school and I need to use facts, is this the website for me? Is this an accurate and trustworthy website? You're going to actually go through the website and you're going to fill out this chart. They have to have the understanding of what makes an appropriate research site because now we ask them to do it, they're going to be asked to do research in high school and so on. You're going to be doing this in partners. And what I did was I emailed you the link to the site. Kayla, you can use one. I assigned the site to use specifically because I see her use About.com a lot. Is it free of advertising? So do you see ads all over the site.
Child In Blue & White Shirt OC
No.
Alaysia VO
It says that are mean and angry may not be good sources of information. It's pretty calm, don't you think? It's important to learn because...
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Alaysia Sixth Grade
...sometimes when you research things, they can't always be true. So like you have to understand which website to use and which website not to use.
Emily Koch OC
That's a fact, numbers, information. It is time. I'm really curious. There's some really interesting sites. So let's hear how you did.
Male Child With Black Hair OC/VO
Well from this article, I found out there's both sides of the story.
Emily Koch VO/OC
Would you say that this is a site that you could go to to get quality information? Do you think it's a trustworthy site?
Male Child With Black Hair OC
Yes.
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Emily Koch OC
Great. So get some facts, some opinions?
Male Child With Black Hair VO
Yes.
Emily Koch OC
It gives both sides. Beautiful.
Male Child In Black & White Shirt OC
Many ads that kind of confuse you and make you go off topic. And it doesn't really give real good information and facts why you should, you should have all the .
Emily Koch OC/VO
It's kind of hard to, to fully tell what's even going on here. Okay? I think that's absolutely fantastic. So we ask you all of the time to go online and do research. So, what did you learn? What kind of things do you know you need to look for to figure out if a site is trustworthy to get research from?
Male Child In Black Shirt VO
Do they have both sides of the story?
Emily Koch OC/VO
Do they have both sides for you to have the facts?
Male Child With Black Hair VO/OC
It doesn't have popup ads or anything like that. It gets you confused of what they're trying to say.
Emily Koch OC
The popup ads. It's like trying to sell something to you.
Male Child With Black Hair OC
Un-huh.
Emily Koch OC/VO
Okay. Do you guys think it's important to do this? To evaluate? To use their common sense, lessons to have those moments of aha, I think are incredibly valuable. And then to weave those into the everyday lesson. And I think it brings things out in them conclusions they wouldn't otherwise come to.
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Classroom Takeaways: 1 Engage Students With A Controversial Topic 2 Limit Vocabulary To 3-4 Key Words 3 Maintain Ongoing Checks For Understanding 4 Use A Timer To Keep Students On Track
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