EduBlog Insights

“Take a group of fifth grade students and break them into groups,

with each group picking a topic that interests them. Any topic.

Next, send the groups of kids to Wikipedia to look up the topic they

selected. Chances are, someone has already created a Wikipedia entry on

that particular subject. The horse, for example, has an extensive entry

on the website. It certainly looks accurate and informative, but is it?

Unfortunately, there are no citations for any of the facts claimed

about horses on the page.

content on the page into manageable chunks, each with a certain amount

of facts that need to be verified. The students then spend the

necessary time to fact-check the content. As the students work their

way through the list, they’ll find themselves with two possible

outcomes: either they’ll verify that a particular factoid is correct,

or they’ll prove that it’s not. Either way, they’ll generate a paper

trail, as it were, of sources proving the various claims one way or

another.

Once the Wikipedia entry has been fact-checked, the teacher creates

a Wikipedia login for the class. They go to the entry’s talk page and

present their findings, laying out every idea that needs to be

corrected. Then, they edit the actual entry to make the corrections,

with all sources cited. Similarly, for all the parts of the entry

they’ve verified as accurate, they list sources confirming it. That

way, each idea presented in the Wikipedia entry has been verified and

like this. Students doing the editing and the research. I hope the

teachers I will be working with at the high school level will like it,

too.

realized that this was a community based on different values. That

little number in brackets beside the “Comments” hyperlink grew, and

sometimes it didn’t. The most important thing is that they all realized

that communities are not built on the number of comments one receives

on one’s blog but on the quality of engagement with topics that are

personally relevant. (In fact, most commented on the work of their

peers in their blog entries and not by writing comments, but that’s

another entry.) It helped them realize, to use a grade eight student’s

words, “how much can happen when you work with others.”

is one of my favorite blogs to read. He had gone back over his notes

from the school year and remembered this incident when students were

disappointed about not receiving comments. It seems that most comments

on the first wave were going to the “popular” crowd and it appeared

that social cliques had turned digital. Read the entire post and if you haven’t added this blog to you daily

reads, you need to.
 

classroom.