Changing Plans and The Future of This Site

low angle photography of metal building on grayscale
Photo by Clem Onojeghuo on Pexels.com

As I’ve mentioned previously, this site in one form or another has existed since 2006. Through multiple platform changes and changes in focus, I’ve shared thoughts and insights here for the past decade and a half.

As we all know, change is the only constant. With my job responsibilities and beginning my doctoral work, I knew I needed to find a better way to share my thoughts and things I find of interest that you might enjoy.

So, here’s my plan:

On Mondays and Fridays, I will share posts with links to things I’ve found that you may also find useful.

Tuesday – Thursday, I’ll be sharing links with my own commentary and hopefully making some connections with other sources. I may even have multiple posts these days.

I’m doing my best to build an online database of connected topics and thoughts that, I hope, will help me better formulate my own thinking around different subjects I’m passionate about.

Sometimes it will be education, sometimes technology, sometimes life. Whatever I find interesting is game for this blog.

Who knows? Maybe I’ll build something you’ll enjoy.



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Assorted Links for Monday, May 16, 2022

  1. Free sound effects for you to use in school projects from the fine folks at the BBC
  2. Explordle – watch a video clip and guess where the video was taken. Great for identifying context clues and environments
  3. Relationship Building with Dialogue Journals
  4. Three videos about the black hole at the center of the Milky Way

On Dealing with Fake News in Education

fake news
Photo by Nijwam Swargiary on Unsplash

Fake news. Disinformation. Misinformation. We see it all and so do our students.

We can choose to ignore it or we, as educators, can help students see what is real, what is fake, and what is somewhere in-between.

Kimberly Rues writes as she tries to get a better understanding of fake news herself:

Eating the proverbial elephant one bite at a time seems like a great place to begin, but which bite to take first? I would propose that we might begin by steeping ourselves in definitions that allow us to speak with clarity in regards to the types of misleading information. Developing a common vocabulary, if you will.

In my quest to deeply understand the elephant on the menu, I dug into this infographic from the European Association for Viewers Interests which took me on a tour of ten types of misleading news—propaganda, clickbait, sponsored content, satire and hoax, error, partisan, conspiracy theory, pseudoscience, misinformation and bogus information. Of course, I recognized those terms, but it allowed me to more clearly articulate the similarities and differences in text and images that fit these descriptions.

My first instinct is to keep bringing us all back to the subject of digital citizenship (which is just good citizenship in a digital world) but I know I’m still a small voice in a big world.

Also: here’s one of my favorite tools to help recognize media bias.