Kāhui Ako Achievement Challenge 5: Improve the achievement of students with additional needs in the learning areas of English/ key competency using symbols, languages and texts.
My Inquiry Problem/ Challenge: Children living in a digital world, where key competencies are essential, require ubiquitous access to cybersmart scaffolds and resources which are not currently available.
Can we trust everything that is online? NO!! That seems like such an obvious answer to us as adults but is it that obvious to children?
My Inquiry Problem/ Challenge: Children living in a digital world, where key competencies are essential, require ubiquitous access to cybersmart scaffolds and resources which are not currently available.
Can we trust everything that is online? NO!! That seems like such an obvious answer to us as adults but is it that obvious to children?
Every morning, my class explores kiwikids news. We scroll through the headlines and the children get to choose a couple of articles to read as a class. Today, I stumbled across this news article. I knew straight away that this was an April Fools prank, but I wanted to see how the children responded as I read the article aloud to them.
The first half of the article seemed pretty reasonable and used language which didn't cause any suspicion. It wasn't until I began to read the paragraph which said that the reason for daylight saving being changed was to support the Prime Minister with her young child's sleeping patterns that a couple of children started giving each other puzzled looks. Some children interestingly still did not see anything amiss.
It was really interesting to see that only a small number of children actually realised that this article wasn't quite right as they read. They were showing that they were able to think critically about the text and make a decision as to whether they trusted the information or not. What was equally interesting was the large number of children who didn't realise that this article seemed a bit odd until the very end when it stated that it was an April Fools joke.
This showed the importance of teaching children to be critical about what they read from a young age. Clearly, children in year 5 are capable of learning the skills to be critical when reading information (as observed by some of the children's facial expressions). This experience was a great way to teach learners that they can't trust everything they read online. I am keen to find more articles like this to continue to develop this aspect of the cybersmart curriculum.
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