One of the librarians at Washington University played this video for our students. It was a great supplement to their lesson on how to use the internet for research.
Citing this post: Urbano, L., 2012. How Google Works, Retrieved May 19th, 2012, from Montessori Muddle: http://MontessoriMuddle.org/ .
Attribution (Curator's Code ): Via: ᔥ Montessori Muddle; Hat tip: ↬ Montessori Muddle.
This morning I did a little presentation with the middle school on how to do research on the internet, and we actually had a very good discussion. I focused on two key things: assessing credibility and writing citations (giving credit).
[Henry] Hudson’s main goal as an explorer was to find a northern passage to the Orient. … He started his journey in May of 1607 and returned in September of the same year when his route was blocked by the Great Barrier Reef.
– All About Explorers (accessed Feb. 2012): Henry Hudson
I started by having the students to look up some explorers. If you prefix an explorer’s name with “all about explorers” (e.g. “all about explorers Christopher Columbus) the first link on google leads to the right website.
They were supposed to read the page and recorded three facts that they found interesting, but, in doing so, it pretty quickly becomes apparent that the information might not be very reliable; Columbus did not, after all, have to rely on infomercials to build support for his expedition.
The All About Explorers website was created by a group of teachers to be a tool for teaching about how to do research on the internet.
Having them see the site come up on google is, I think, better than sending them directly to the url. Google is usually their first recourse for researching anything, so it’s nice to see that google does not give information about credibility.
The discussion that ensued ranged pretty widely, but a key question that kept recurring was: how do you judge the credibility of a website. We talked a little bit about the possible biases of commercial .com and .net websites, and about the fact that .org’s may well also have their own biases, since it does not require any credentials to set one up (see montessorimuddle.org for example). On the other hand, while .gov and .edu domains (as well as most U.S. state and other country websites) are restricted to governments and colleges, that improves their credibility, but, in itself, is no guarantee of accuracy or being unbiased.
So much of assessing websites’ credibility comes from experience, which students just don’t have much of yet, so I recommended that checking with teachers and adults might be a good bet. Confirming data from multiple sources also helps, but you have to be careful, since so many websites now use Wikipedia as a source (or even reprint things directly from Wikipedia) that any errors in a Wikipedia page can spread far and wide pretty fast.
We did not get into how to use Wikipedia well (go for the sources at the bottom of the page), but we’ll get to that later.
For the second part of the lesson, I had them look up the same explorers they’d searched on the All About Explorers website. They had free range to search anywhere they wanted, but not only did they have to now collect facts but were to also find a good picture.
I’d wanted the pictures so we could talk about copyright and getting permissions to use media, but we did not get that far.
While they were satisfyingly more skeptical about where they got their information from, they were quite happy to give me the facts they’d found without attribution.
So I took the chance to talk about citing sources: to give credit where it is due; to avoid even the appearance of plagiarism; to give your reader an idea of how credible your sources are (and by extension how credible you are); and to let you readers know how up-to-date your information is.
An example of a citation for a website.
For the next week or so the middle and high school are on an interim. This is our writing interim, so they’ll be working on research projects (including how to do research) and creating publications (I’m in charge of the science journal).
Since more and more research is going online, hopefully this was a good primer to get students started.
Citing this post: Urbano, L., 2012. How to do Research on the Internet: A Lesson, Retrieved May 19th, 2012, from Montessori Muddle: http://MontessoriMuddle.org/ .
Attribution (Curator's Code ): Via: ᔥ Montessori Muddle; Hat tip: ↬ Montessori Muddle.
Haiku Finder is a quick and extremely dirty way of finding haiku’s in any texts.
You may not want to let your students find out about this site, or, alternatively, having them plug in their existing texts might make for an interesting way of introducing haikus.
I’m not particularly poetic (tell me something I don’t know), I have to go back through a month of posts to get my first Muddle haiku:
One of those things is
that rabbits eat their own poop.
Well not exactly.– from On Rabbit Digestion
Citing this post: Urbano, L., 2011. Haiku Finder: Haikus are everywhere, Retrieved May 19th, 2012, from Montessori Muddle: http://MontessoriMuddle.org/ .
Attribution (Curator's Code ): Via: ᔥ Montessori Muddle; Hat tip: ↬ Montessori Muddle.
The National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy has recently issued a report showing that teen pregnancy dropped by 6% in 2009. They have some evidence that the TV show “16 and Pregnant”, which I’ve mentioned before, is one of the reasons why.
Among those teens who have watched MTV’s 16 and Pregnant, 82% think the show helps teens better understand the challenges of teen pregnancy and parenthood and how to avoid it.
- Albert (2010)
Of course, it’s essential to note that, “Teens (46%) say parents most influence their decisions about sex.”
The report has many more details.
Citing this post: Urbano, L., 2010. Sex. Ed. on TV update, Retrieved May 19th, 2012, from Montessori Muddle: http://MontessoriMuddle.org/ .
Attribution (Curator's Code ): Via: ᔥ Montessori Muddle; Hat tip: ↬ Montessori Muddle.
Graphs of the words Montessori and muddle created with Google Ngram.
If you take all the books ever written and draw a graph showing which words were used when, you’d end up with something like Google’s Ngram. Of course I thought I’d chart “Montessori” and “muddle”.
The “Montessori” graph is interesting. It seems to show the early interest in her work, around 1912, and then an interesting increase in interest in the 1960′s and 1970′s. Like with all statistics, one should really be cautious about how you interpret this type of data, however, I suspect this graph explains a lot about the sources of modern trends in Montessori education. I’d love hear someone with more experience thinks.
Alexis Madrigal has an interesting collection of graphs, while Discover has an article with much more detail about what can be done with Google’s database.
Citing this post: Urbano, L., 2010. Ngram: The history of words, Retrieved May 19th, 2012, from Montessori Muddle: http://MontessoriMuddle.org/ .
Attribution (Curator's Code ): Via: ᔥ Montessori Muddle; Hat tip: ↬ Montessori Muddle.
The definition of parasite on Visuwords.
Visuwords is a great visual dictionary. It not only gives definitions, but shows the links between antonyms, synonyms and etymology.
I plugged in a few of the words from this cycle’s vocabulary lists (parasite, circumnavigate, host, viceroy etc.) and the results were quite neat.
Also, if you double click a word/node it expands to show you the things it’s connected to. This can lead to a quite complex diagram. It would have been great to use it for the word navigator, because it gives a graphic organizer that pretty much covers what we talked about for social world this cycle.
Definition of eukaryote. Notice it links to the word prokaryote (the red line indicates that it's an antonym).
Citing this post: Urbano, L., 2010. Visuwords: a visual dictionary, Retrieved May 19th, 2012, from Montessori Muddle: http://MontessoriMuddle.org/ .
Attribution (Curator's Code ): Via: ᔥ Montessori Muddle; Hat tip: ↬ Montessori Muddle.
Answer survey questions to better understand your characters in these Character Tests by R.J. Hembree as part of the online Writers’ Village University project (found via GalleyCat).
Sample question from the Character Builder Test (Hembree, 2010).
Building realistic characters is an essential component of writing fiction. The Character Tests are a part of a Character Building Workshop page, which also contains Character Building Tips, character archetypes, and a set of character disorders that help define them.
The challenge that comes with working with something like this is that following archetypes too closely has the potential to lead to cliched writing. This site could be very useful if used with caution. From the site’s creator:
The Character Building Workshop is an independent study of your characters using these online questionnaires. The process of filling out the forms will help you, the writer, learn about your characters on a more in-depth level. Once the questions have been answered, you will know more about the roles your characters play in your story. No longer will they be names on a page; they will become living, breathing beings as you continue writing your story.
–Hembree, 2010)
Citing this post: Urbano, L., 2010. Building characters, Retrieved May 19th, 2012, from Montessori Muddle: http://MontessoriMuddle.org/ .
Attribution (Curator's Code ): Via: ᔥ Montessori Muddle; Hat tip: ↬ Montessori Muddle.
What if you exchanged countries based on population for land area? So China, which is the most populous country would take the place of Russia, which has the largest area. It would create the intriguing map below (from the wonderful blog, Strange Maps).
World Map if the largest countries had the biggest populations. Map by Frank Jacobs.
Citing this post: Urbano, L., 2010. Rearranging the map, Retrieved May 19th, 2012, from Montessori Muddle: http://MontessoriMuddle.org/ .
Attribution (Curator's Code ): Via: ᔥ Montessori Muddle; Hat tip: ↬ Montessori Muddle.
