Blog 2

I thought that the eSchool News articles we had to read were interesting.  In the article titled "Why more schools aren't teaching web literacy-and how they can start," we read that the ~ character should be read as a personal web page instead of an official document.  I honestly did not know that.  I have not been taught how to properly decode the meaning of characters in a web address either.  The only thing I was taught was, "If it ends in .edu, .org. or .net, it's probably a good source."  So this article really put into perspective what it means to be web literate, and how we weren't taught this when I was in school and how schools still aren't teaching it. 
Another part of this article that sparked my interest was the social bookmarking tool, Diigo.  I have never heard of Diigo before, and I am interested in watching the online review and checking it out myself.  This tool is great for group research projects and individual projects. This definitely would have been a great tool for me to use when I was in school, and I will love to introduce it to my students some day.  As for the idea of having a class Twitter account, I'm not too sure.  I have never been to Twitter's website and I'm not sure how it would work in a class setting.

I definitely could relate to the article titled "Web literacy: Where the Common Core meets common sense."  I often use one search engine (Google) to do projects, and, as mentioned in the article, only look at the first page of results and settle on something that's 'close enough.'  I believe that this is a result of not being taught how to research any other way. I was actually taught to not look on the second page of a Google result because the information was almost always not good enough or reliable.  I started thinking that this automatically meant that the first page was full of nothing but credible sources and great information.  Of course, I realize now that this isn't true, but I still used the same methods because I only had a short amount of time to find the information and didn't know how else to go about it.
I also really liked the example the article used to grab students' attention by typing 'ear mouse' in Google, then clicking images, and then researching how the ear got on the mouse's back.  This would be a great introductory activity in a lesson to help students understand the difference between primary sources and secondary sources.  I agree with the article when it stated that "We believe there should be an urgency to teach students to think when they use the internet.  This takes practice in many different research situations."  We need to give children many opportunities to carry out these research situations.