Closer Inspection

Though there is a vast amount of information available through the Internet, it is our duty as teachers to make sure our students use this resource responsibly.

Its easy to just type something up with some fancy coding and pass is off as fact; for that reason, students must always search around for the source of the information. They can do this by simply taking a few minutes to look around on the website, find the author's name and do a quick Google search on him or her. Everyday, multiple citizens are offended by an outlandish new article posted by the satirical new site, The Onion, but had they taken a quick look around the site they would have found the disclaimer : "The Onion uses invented names in all its stories, except in cases where public figures are being satirized. Any other use of real names is accidental and coincidental."- saving the webmaster from sifting though a lot of angry emails.

There are, however, sources that are almost always reliable and trustworthy. Any journal found through ebscohost.net, or the news site cnn.com and other such sources would be O.K. for a student to rely on. Students should, however, steer clear of user- edited sites such as Wikipedia, as there have been a number of cases where an article is found to have stated the exact opposite of what is fact.

Virtual Field Trips

My students and I have been studying famous artists the past few weeks, and I wanted to end this fun unit with a bang: a field trip to the closest art museum. However, the museum is more than three hours away, and there was just no way I could come up with the funds to transport all of them. So I decided to do a virtual tour, provided by the museum's website. We made a huge show of the thing; I took down all the posters around the room, and projects a different painting on each wall. We walked around the classroom like we were taking a tour of a real building. It was a fun, free day that really got the kids involved and interested.

However, we were limited by the number of projectors we could procure, and therefore, we only got to see a fraction of the paintings I'd have liked the kids to see. And we didn't get started on the sculptures. Although this was a great, cost-free method of doing something we otherwise wouldn't have gotten to do, there's nothing like seeing the real thing.