Critical Information Literacy Project

Question: How we ensure that our students will be critical consumers of information on the world wide web? Think about this question in the context of sites like:

• http://www.martinlutherking.org/
• http://kids.stormfront.org/
• http://www.ihr.org/

This is a hard (impossible?) question to answer. I do not know if a good answer exists, and I don't expect you to fully answer this question, but I hope you will try.

This project may be completed individually or in a group of two students. You are encouraged, but not required, to find a partner with whom to work on this project. Projects completed alone will be graded the same as projects completed with a partner, so it is to your advantage to find a partner to divide the work.

Create an assignment for your students in which they critically analyze an issue presented on the Internet. You may try to create an assignment for early elementary students, but you will probably be more successful if you think of this for upper elementary or middle school students. For reference, you might look at the following examples:

• http://www.studentpersonalpages.loyola.edu/home/jtracy/criticallessonone.html
• http://www.studentpersonalpages.loyola.edu/home/mthompson/genetics.html
• http://www.toad.net/~rjaniszewski/Lesson.htm

Note that these examples were created by graduate students in a class that focused on this issue. You are not expected to match the quality and/or quantity of work in these projects.

Your lesson can be based around one web site that takes a particular stand on an issue, or it can be based on several web sites that take different stands on a single issue. You might, for example, explore the stand taken at Learning in the Real World, an organization that is critical of uses of technology in the classroom (note that you may pick a site that has nothing to with education or technology), or you might, for example, look for information about the current controversy around an alleged link between childhood vaccines and autism.

Be sure that the assignment insists that your students look at a variety of resources about the chosen issue (both offline and online), and be sure that you have some guidelines for critically analyzing web sites. When analyzing a given site, students should not stop at the site itself but should look at links from and to that site and other sites that discuss that site, organization, or issue. Be sure students discuss the site from a variety of perspectives, such as: is it emotionally effective, is the information backed up by facts, is the information backed up by sound research.

Create a web page for the assignment that your students could access to complete the assignment.

Prepare a PowerPoint presentation that describes the evaluation criteria you have chosen to teach to your students. This PowerPoint presentation should be aimed at other teachers to introduce them to the topic of evaluation of web sites.

Requirements

• You should create an organized lesson plan that you can use with students.
• You should create a lesson that will engage your students and begin to teach them the skills needed to critically analyze web sites.
• You should include information about critically analyzing web sites, such as rubrics or checklists.
• You should list various sources about the web sites.
• You should include a brief discussion about why you chose the particular sites you included in the assignment.
• All URLs that you list should be accurate.
• You should create this lesson in the form of a web page (even if you would hand it out to students on paper) that includes correct HTML tags
• All your work should be professionally presented, including correct grammar, spelling, and punctuation.

Your web page should:

• Correctly use HTML tags.
• Have an appropriate title on the top of the page, using the <title> tag.
• Use tables and or lists to line things up when appropriate.
• Include pointers to at least 3 other web pages related to the issue.
• Contain graphics.
• Contain your email address in a "clickable" form.
• Be presented neatly and professionally, including correct grammar, punctuation, and spelling.

For your PowerPoint presentation,

• You must have at least 10 slides in your presentation.
• Your presentation must be neat and professional, including correct grammar, spelling, and punctuation.
• Your presentation must take full advantage of the multimedia aspects of PowerPoint, including some (not necessarily all) of the following: text, sound, music, graphics, pictures, and video.
• Your presentation should follow basic rules of design, especially limiting the amount of text on the screen at any given time (generally a maximum of 7 lines and 7 words per line) and making the font size large enough to be seen from the back of a classroom.
• Note that in class we will discuss some of the interactive features of PowerPoint. You are not required to make your presentation interactive.

Meeting these criteria in a minimal way will earn the grade of C. Grades of A and B are reserved for excellent and very good work.

You should hand in a large envelope containing the following:

• a printed copy of your web page from the browser
• a printed copy of your web page from the word processor (with the HTML codes)
• a printed copy of your PowerPoint presentation (preferably printed with six slides per page)
• an electronic copy (either sent via email or turned in on a Zip disk or CD) of the web page (with all external files such as graphics) and PowerPoint presentation (be sure that each group member retains an electronic copy)
• for groups of two or more, for each group member, a copy of the "Group Self-Evaluation" form enclosed in a sealed envelope (not to be shared with your other group members)

This page was prepared by Dr. David M. Marcovitz.

Last Updated: August 29, 2003