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ANNOUNCING
the February, 1997 issue of
From Now On
at
http://fromnowon.org
(brief excerpt below)
The New "HomeWork"
Parents and Students Together on the Web:
A Dozen Information Skills for the Home
by Jamie McKenzie
With the explosion of home access to the Web, we are looking
at a "New HomeWork." Given the lag between home access (for
the affluent) and school access in many places, schools must
consider ways to help parents help students make profitable
use of this home access.
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The Internet is deceptively easy. You can log on pretty much
automatically. You can find information without much trouble
at all. Finding truth is quite another matter.
This is a great opportunity to support your children, helping
them to identify reliable sources, notice bias, resist
propaganda and develop their own independent ideas based upon
research.
If you raise your children on a steady diet of Internet
information well leavened with lessons on how to browse,
sort, sift, cull and synthesize, you will see a tremendous
pay-off as they pass through school and into the job market.
In this article, we offer a dozen activities you might enjoy
exploring with your daughter or son.
1. The Question is the answer
Explanation: The better your children are at generating
questions, the more capable they will be when building
answers. In the old research, teachers provided questions
while students searched for answers. In an Information Age
students must create their own answers out of a puzzling
world. The most important tool for building answers,
ironically, is questioning. The more thorough and thoughtful
the questions posed before and during the research, the
greater the chance that the investigation will lead to
insight.
Activity:
Begin with a choice your family is about to make. Let's say
your family wants to buy a new car or a new TV. Maybe you are
thinking of a vacation.
Before you jump onto the Internet and begin your search for
information, challenge your child to think of as many
questions as possible while you type them or write them down.
Questions beget questions. They are like families. For most
important questions, you can easily list a hundred or more
subsidiary questions, many of which can be grouped by
category. In the case of a new car, questions might group
under cost , performance , styling options , etc.
Once you have a healthy list of questions, keep your list
open so you can enter relevant findings as you encounter
them. Your child learns the importance of planning before
researching. In addition, the act of searching becomes more
structured as the skills of note-taking are introduced -
note-taking which is channeled by the questions posed. When
children are quite young, the parent can do most of the
typing. As they reach upper elementary and middle school,
they should be performing most of this questioning and
note-taking themselves.
Jamie McKenzie
Editor - "From Now On - The Educational Technology Journal"
mckenzie@FROMNOWON.ORG
http://FROMNOWON.ORG
Network 609
562 West Lake Samish Drive
Bellingham, WA 98226
(360) 647-8759
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