Olympics Project: Modeling Internet Research & Encouraging Digital Citizenship

My hardworking and curious group of Grade 1s has jumped on board for our Olympics learning project.  After our Skype call launch with the OLCS Kindergartens on Tuesday, our class did some research together to answer two of their inquiry questions.  This allowed me to model some basic research.  Students suggested we use the internet to find information, so I modeled a web search and read aloud information from a relevant website.  After listening, some rereading and discussion, students were ready to answer the two questions.

We wrote our answers together; students explained their understandings and I typed for them.  Next, we discussed the importance of verifying information to ensure that it is correct.  Students identified that "not everything on the internet is true" (I thought it was great that they knew this!), so we checked our information by using another website.  Then, we also discussed the importance of sourcing since we'd used other people's ideas and information to help us learn.  We included the websites we'd used in our post to show that we had learned from those sites.

It was one short activity, but deliberate teaching allowed me to address a number of important topics and skills:

• digital citizenship: giving credit to our sources when we learn from others
• Olympics inquiry: we answered questions that they students had generated for this project
• shared writing: working together, we wrote sentences that clearly communicated our answers
• research skills: verifying information, searching online, using visual and text information