Giant All-Powerful Robot Librarian

When I'm teaching 3rd graders about the internet research process, one of the things I spend some time on is how even though it is the most popular search engine now, and even though it happens to be my favorite for most things, Google is not the only game in town.

I go back to an analogy that I used with them in first grade, imagining that the internet is like the biggest library you could ever imagine, except instead of being in a building, it lives in computers all over the world, and anyone who wants to can put their stuff in there for others to see. I suggest that if you think of it like this, then browsers are like the glasses that let you look at the internet and search engines like Google are like the not-nearly-as-smart-as-real-live-ones robot librarians that help you find what you're looking for.

So, for the not-just-Google lesson, I remind them that there are other librarians in this crazy library, and ask them to imagine what might happen if there weren't. I suggest that as other librarians went away, Google would get bigger and more and more powerful, and soon might be the only search engine left, and then what if Google said "Sure, I'll find a picture of a puppy for you...if you give me a dollar!"

I don't want to have them use search engines that are less user-friendly or less effective, and I sure do like the ease of the built-in Google box in most browsers, (Will Richardson makes valid points about how AltaVista and others can be useful for some types of advanced searching, but I haven't found that relevant yet for my 3rd-5th graders.) so I still let them use Google if they choose, but hope that the image of a gigantic evil robot librarian sticks in their mind.

In a perfect world (ie. if I could see every class every day), I would love to do an inquiry where we compare results for a variety of searches from a variety of search engines, but I'm already packing too much into each class period and we haven't even gotten to helpful keyword add-ons (eg. history, biography, kids), choosing from search results, tabbed browsing, the Wikipedia conversation, navigating a page, dissecting a url, evaluating sites, or taking notes.

How do you all teach internet research skills?
(Image from Flickr user Mykl Roventine)

Annual movies

The first graders have finished their "about me" movies in iMovie, and the second graders are about to start. Students will make a movie every year about who they are at that point in time, since they change so much so fast. When they graduate, they'll take all the movies with them on dvd as a sort of time capsule of their elementary school years.

In first grade, the movies are interviews with partners, in second, they write and read scripts, and in third-fifth they'll add new elements--editing, titles, transitions, music, still photos. This is a very new project, and I'm open to suggestions!

Make-your-own Tree Octopi

After discovering via the Northwest Tree Octopus website that even pictures can lie, my third graders learned to make their own tree octopi using Photoshop Elements. Also their own surfing dogs, motorcycle-riding sharks, and head-switched wrestlers!

We started with the magic wand tool, but that turned out to be a little difficult for them to manage, so we switched to the lasso tool, used copy and paste, then learned the arrow and eraser tools. Next we'll tackle the concept of layers.