Nazis, Hitler and Research Resources

In today's world, where we use the internet every day for a variety of purposes it is undeniably important to be able to at assess the validity of information we find online. David Marcovitz talks about how this is even more important than usual in the field of education in his article "I read it on the computer, it must be true." Marcovitz says that students will often believe anything that is presented in a professional looking manner, and one of the perils of the internet is that most anything can look legitimate, regardless of whether it is reliable. As teachers, it is our job to not only teach our students how to find information online, but also how to make good judgments about what they have found. Marcovitz presents a lesson plan that leads students to multiple websites that address the same topic in different ways with different biases to help them see how even information that looks reliable can be questionable. I don't want to make my students untrusting and paranoid, but I do want to help them make informed judgments about everything they read, whether it is online or not.

Like Marcovitz, author Joyce Kasman Valenza is concerned with the type of information that students are accessing. However, the focus of her article "What's not on the web" is all of the valuable research sources that students miss when they rely solely on the internet. Valenza lists some of the resources that are available in hard copies such as reference books and older magazine articles, as well as why these are valuable to the research process. This topic is important to me as a future teacher because it will be up to me to show my digital learners that it is sometimes a good idea to turn off the computer for a while. I will have to make a concentrated effort to teach them how to effectively use nondigital resources to supplement their online research. As with most things, the answer to where the best place to find information is is not black and white. Online and traditional resources both have their benefits and drawbacks, and it is my job as a teacher to show my students when to use each.