This four-lesson unit on search skills and critical thinking teaches students how to target and specify their online searches to avoid unwanted results, how to judge whether a link, search result or website is legitimate or phony, and how to find legitimate sources online for media works such as music, videos and movies. In this lesson, students apply what they have learned in the first two lessons to find and verify information online.
Level: Grades 4 to 6
About the Author: This lesson was written for MediaSmarts by Ethan Anderson
Duration: 1-2 hours
In this lesson students will identify and classify their own interactions with the Internet and will engage in a collaborative critical thinking activity that will have them examine the Internet from a variety of perspectives.
In this lesson students learn how to create well-defined search strings and to use tools and techniques such as bookmarking, browser filters and search engine preferences to avoid unwanted material.
In this lesson, students apply their searching and critical thinking skills to learn how to find legitimate online sources for downloading and streaming movies, music and videos.
In this lesson, students learn about and discuss the legal aspects of cyberbullying.
Students will discuss the concept of human rights and then learn how these ideas led to the drafting of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child.
In this lesson, students will compare and contrast a variety of online social networking platforms and build an understanding of how they work to share messages. They will reflect on basic online rules and explore concepts of safety and privacy when accessing and sharing information online.
In this lesson students learn how to authenticate online information by comparing “facts” from the website www.allaboutexplorers.com with more authoritative sources.
In this lesson, students explore the verbal and visual cues that we rely on to understand how other people are feeling. They then consider the differences between online and offline communication and discuss how these differences may make it difficult to understand the effect our words and actions have on others online. Students then identify strategies for mitigating these aspects of online communication and apply those strategies to create a media product in which they are used successfully.