Reading Like A Historian The Reading Like a Historian curriculum engages students in historical inquiry. Each lesson revolves around a central historical question and features sets of primary documents designed for groups of students with diverse reading skills and abilities. This curriculum teaches students how to investigate historical questions by employing reading strategies such as sourcing, contextualizing, corroborating, and close reading. Instead of memorizing historical facts, students evaluate the trustworthiness of multiple perspectives on historical issues. They learn to make historical claims backed by documentary evidence. How do I use these lessons in my classroom? The 73 lessons in the U.S. curriculum, initial 37 lessons of the world curriculum, and 5 lessons in the introduction to historical thinking unit can be taught in succession. 1) Establish relevant background knowledge and pose the central historical question. *Note: United Streaming requires a subscription to Discovery Education.
How to read and understand a scientific paper: a guide for non-scientists From vaccinations to climate change, getting science wrong has very real consequences. But journal articles, a primary way science is communicated in academia, are a different format to newspaper articles or blogs and require a level of skill and undoubtedly a greater amount of patience. Here Jennifer Raff has prepared a helpful guide for non-scientists on how to read a scientific paper. These steps and tips will be useful to anyone interested in the presentation of scientific findings and raise important points for scientists to consider with their own writing practice. My post, The truth about vaccinations: Your physician knows more than the University of Google sparked a very lively discussion, with comments from several people trying to persuade me (and the other readers) that their paper disproved everything that I’d been saying. It’s not just a fun academic problem. “Be skeptical. What constitutes enough proof? Before you begin: some general advice 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10.
SearchReSearch: Answer: Fake or real? How do you know? 1. Is this a faked photo? If so, how can you tell? (Be specific.) The obvious thing in the picture is the jet fighter in the upper left. I've added a couple of arrows to indicate the direction the light is falling. Remmij also spotted the roundel on the wing and tried to identify it. Remmij ALSO spotted another indicator of being shopped: A cursor left in the image! So this image is clearly a FAKE! Review 1: Stayed here for two nights with my wife and golden retriever in a pet friendly room. Review 2: We only stayed for one night but I would have happily stayed here longer. How do you start on a question like this? If you think about it, there are many great reasons to write a fake review (of hotels, restaurants, music recordings, films... anything that people buy AND review will attract faked reviews). I started this question by searching for some background on how to detect faked reviews: Running these two reviews through ReviewSkeptic suggests that they're both real reviews. 3. 1. 2.
Five Strategies to Help Students Conduct Better Informational Searches Google is great for navigational and transactional searches. If you need to find your way to the movie theater or find the best price for a vacuum cleaner, Google handles those requests quite well. Searches for more meaningful information aren't always handled well by Google. For example, see the some of the nonsense "suggested" search terms that sometimes appear with your search. 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. I will cover all of these strategies in more depth in Search Strategies Students Need to Know. SearchReSearch: Search Challenge (11/11/15): Fake or real? How do you know? Unfortunately... ... people have been faking stories, photos, and claims for as long as humans have been around. Of course now we're aided by technology, which sometimes makes these deceptions a bit more difficult to ferret out. Here's an early famously faked photograph: This is one of the images of the Cottingley Fairies. In 1920, a series of photos, supposedly taken by two young girls while playing in the garden, claimed to show that fairies really did exist. 2. Review 1: Stayed here for two nights with my wife and golden retriever in a pet friendly room. Review 2: We only stayed for one night but I would have happily stayed here longer. 3. Quote 1: “Do you want to know who you are? Quote 2: “That the obliquity of the ecliptic, when these elephants lived, was so great as to include with the tropics all those reasons in which the bones are found." As always, let us know how you figured these Challenges out! Search on!
Research Exploration Exercise | Community of Online Research Assignments Short Description: This assignment is designed to help students develop a thoughtful research topic. Students go through a series of steps, questions, and background reading to help them better understand and refine a research topic. Course Context (e.g. how it was implemented or integrated): This exercise is due week 3, usually before library instruction. Using a Topic Development exercise, students will explore and conduct preliminary research on three separate research topics. This is the first assignment in a sequence of writing and oral assignments (followed by a Research Proposal, Annotated Bibliography, Persuasive Research Paper, etc.). Potential Pitfalls and Teaching Tips: Some students may think this is busy work.
How Photos Fuel the Spread of Fake News Even rudimentary skills aren't required to create, say, a meme of Seddique Mateen, whose son Omar Mateen fatally shot 48 people at Pulse nightclub in Orlando, Florida, that allegedly shows him visiting Hillary Clinton’s office at the State Department this year. Never mind that Clinton resigned from the job three years before. Photos play a key role in making fake news stories go viral by bolstering the emotional tenor of the lie. They elicit an emotional response, which makes it far more likely that someone will click the link, then share it. “That emotion may be anger, outrage or joy,” says Mandy Jenkins, the head of news at social content provider Storyful. “It triggers something in the readers that says, ‘I have to share this with everyone I know who likes the things I like.’” Such images can reinforce existing prejudices. These dirty tricks work because most people believe a photograph represents reality.
Summarizing different perspectives on a controversial topic | Community of Online Research Assignments Short Description: Using ProQuest SIRS Issues Researcher or similar database, groups of students work together to find and read four informative magazine articles representing a variety of opinions on a topic. For each magazine article they write an MLA citation. In an oral presentation of less than three minutes per group, they summarize the controversy without giving their own opinions and explain why they chose the four articles. Students are told to be prepared to answer questions about their topic and why they selected each of the four articles. Learning Outcomes: Develop successful search strategies appropriate for specific tools. Course Context (e.g. how it was implemented or integrated): Can be adapted for higher level ESL classes. Potential Pitfalls and Teaching Tips: Students tend to summarize the articles rather than the controversy.
The Daily Mixer Here Is A Great Educational Tool for Digital Curation March , 2016 Candy is a cool Chrome extension that allows you to capture ideas and thoughts from any web page and use them in your writing projects. You simply highlight the sentences or portion of text you are interested in and Candy saves and displays it in a card together with the author and the source information. You can embed these cards in your documents (online and offline), share them via email or on popular social media networks such as Twitter and Facebook or embed them in your blog or website the same way you embed a YouTube video. Candy can be of great help to students. They can use it to insert quotations from any webpage right into the document they are working on. It can also be used to generate reference information to data in a document.
10 Hilarious Hoax Sites to Test Website Evaluation – TeachBytes In this day and age, where anyone with access to the internet can create a website, it is critical that we as educators teach our students how to evaluate web content. There are some great resources available for educating students on this matter, such as Kathy Schrock’s Five W’s of Website Evaluation or the University of Southern Maine’s Checklist for Evaluating Websites. Along with checklists and articles, you will also find wonderfully funny hoax websites, aimed at testing readers on their ability to evaluate websites. These hoax sites are a great way to bring humor and hands-on evaluation into your classroom, and test your students’ web resource evaluation IQ! Check out these 11 example hoax sites for use in your own classrooms: Of all of these, my favorite is always the Dihydrogen Monoxide website, which aims to ban dihydrogen monoxide and talks in detail about its dangers. Happy hoax-hunting! Like this: Like Loading...
7 Ways Students Use Diigo To Do Research and Collaborative Project Work January 14, 2015 Diigo is an excellent social bookmarking tool that enable you to save, annotate, and share bookmarks. The power of Diigo lies in the distinctive features that it offers to teachers and educators. There is a special account for K-12 and higher-ed educators that empower registered teachers with a variety of tools and features. Here are some of the ways they can use Diigo group to conduct research in and out of class: Here are some very good video tutorials and screencasts to help you better use Diigo: 1- How to Create a Diigo group for your class by Mark Barnes 2- How to use Diigo to annotate, organize and research 3- How to autopost Diigo bookmarks to your class blog by Cool Cat Teacher 4- Explore social bookmarking with Diigo by Lynda 5- Organize your research with Diigo by Cult of Pedagogy Here some other relevant resources to learn more about how to use Diigo with your students:
10 Ways to Spot a Fake News Article - EasyBib Blog For many of us, 2016 is going down as a year to forget. Election upsets, Zika, the Syrian crisis, and unfortunately tons of fake news about all of the above and everything in between. Denzel Washington was recently quoted as saying, “If you don’t read the newspaper, you’re uninformed. If you do read the newspaper, you’re misinformed.” So what should you do? You want to be informed, but a good deal of the information out there is incorrect or biased. 1. Links and citations allow us to easily access, read, and explore more about the information found in the article. Many big name news sites, such as CNN, do not include links or citations, but other sites do. 2. An article without an author’s name is another red flag. 3. Do a Google search on the author’s name to find their occupation and locate other articles that the author has composed. 4. On the top or bottom of most websites, you should see a section titled “About Us.” 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. How can you prevent the spread of fake news?
quick_start_guide [Zotero Documentation] Translations of this page: Zotero [zoh-TAIR-oh] is a free, easy-to-use tool to help you collect, organize, cite, and share your research sources. Read on for an overview of Zotero's features and capabilities. How do I install Zotero? How do I open Zotero? Zotero can be opened from your operating system's dock or file manager like any other program. What does Zotero do? Zotero is, at the most basic level, a reference manager. What kind of items are there? Every item contains different metadata, depending on what type it is. What can I do with items? Items appear in Zotero's center pane. Collections The left pane includes My Library, which contains all the items in your library. above the left pane to create a new collection, a folder into which items relating to a specific project or topic can be placed. Items can be assigned tags. Searches Quick searches show items whose metadata, tags, or fulltext content match the search terms and are performed from the Zotero toolbar. Saved Searches Attachments