Questions for November 10th (1 and 2)

1.  I would define being information literate as being someone who is able, not only to access information when needed, but to evaluate the accuracy of the information.  When Alan November shared "Zack's Story" in chapter one of his book, it became very clear that, while Zack was "literate" he was not "information literate" because he did not have the necessary skills to evaluate the sites and information he was finding on the Internet, (November 2010).  As I read chapter 1 of November's book, I realized that I, myself, was not as information literate as I should be.  I was someone who thought that checking links and references posted on a web-site was adaquate when checking a site for biases, etc.  Now, I realize how much more I need to learn when researching online.  

2.  Teachers and students can thoughtfully evaluate online resources by first learning how to "MAP" the Internet, (November 2010).  Students and teachers alike need to learn the grammar of the Internet.  We need to learn how to examine meta-web information  including web-addresses, links, and search engines. 
     I personally, never thought much at all about disecting the web-addresses of Internet sites.  I understood some of the basic abbreviations in URLs, but I never really gave it too much thought.  Now I realize that we as teachers need to begin practicing more thorough evaluation of the sites we use ourselves and then we must pass those evaluation skills onto our students.
     I was very surprised to learn how we can who is linked to the sites we view.  I never thought of this before-I only really paid attention to the hyper-links posted on the site.  The skills of looking for the linked sites is one that we must pass along to our students to help them better evaluate sources on the Internet.