Showing posts with label competencies. Show all posts
Showing posts with label competencies. Show all posts

Friday, February 26, 2016

New Tutorial Challenges


Hone your Fluency Skills.

Yesterday I led a workshop at the ICE Conference in St. Charles, IL for teachers, administrators and librarians on the topic of Internet Search Challenges: Google and Beyond.

The themes included competencies on which fluency depends, challenges that require these competencies, search strategies and techniques, how to use challenges with individuals and groups. We never were able to try all the Challenges during the 2.5 hour workshop--even though we never took a break. I shouldn't be surprised: 47 tutorial challenges were created for the workshop.

The tutorials are grouped into three categories: Locate, Evaluate and Cite.  Locate is comprised of three sub-categories: Browsing, Querying and Pesky Search Challenges. All these categories are further divided into Elementary, Intermediate and Advanced Challenges. Elementary is suitable for young and new searchers (no matter what grade), Intermediate builds on those skills and Advanced represents skills high schoolers should possess before entering college (and beyond).

So what I told the participants, I'm telling readers of this blog: try out the challenges for yourself. Use them with individuals and groups. Experiment with them. Think about what works and could work better. I'd love to get your feedback.

Here's where to go to get started: http://21cif.com/tutorials/challenge/challenge-directory.html

An aside:  The Internet went down 10 minutes prior to the start of the workshop and didn't come back for a while. You might imagine it's hard to teach Internet skills without the Internet. We actually filled the first hour offline with a discussion about what skills are needed at what grade levels, when to introduce skills, and how to teach students pre-Internet skills without the Internet. When you think about the Digital Information Fluency model, the first two questions ("What am I searching for?" and "Where will I search?") happen before touching a computer. So being offline didn't slow us down and was still productive.