The Blog Evaluation Lesson

Last week, my colleague, teacher librarian Fran Prather, taught my students to evaluate blogs; the lesson was illuminating for us all. Our students especially enjoyed learning that both Fran and myself have blogs and that we are blogging about them! Working through the lesson with three classes brought three issues to bear:

1. Most of the blogs students would find through Google are blocked arbitrarily by our district's internet filter. Fortunately, some of the web sites they used for research contained blogs within the site, and those we could access. This filtering keeps students from accessing most blogs at school which is a problem for our students without home access. For those students, I set up some time that I could work with them one on one through my unfiltered access. How can we teach digital literacy with such arbitrary road blocks?
2. There really ARE reasons students would want to include information/content from blogs. I, for example, enjoy reading Sharon Begley's Newsweek blog on neuroscience/psychology topics, and I consider her a viable source of that type of information. As Fran pointed out, students could use public blog postings as "primary source" material. Indeed, many of the students accessed appropriate blogs for their topics of research.
3. Both Fran and I learned that blogs are indexed; I would like to learn more about how those indexing sites really worked. She and I will need to investigate the art and science of blogging more thoroughly so that we can share this, along with our other research strategies with our colleauges.

During the course of our current research unit, the web evaluation and the blog evaluation lessons have generated greater "digital literacy" among our students - which is apparent in their discussions about their resources and in their selection of web content for research. The addition of these two lessons to the senior research paper instruction have been powerful, and I will include them next year.