Veterans Park Academy Media Blog

October is “National Information Literacy Awareness Month“.  So let’s celebrate:

Be curious about the world you live in and…

1. Ask questions
2. Gather information from lots of different sources – books, databases, videos, podcasts, websites, blogs, personal interviews, and more
3. Analyze it
4. Think about it
5. Prove whether it’s true – or not
6. Figure out if  its biased
7. Talk or chat or text with a friend about what you read
8. Organize it
9. Create something (a video, an essay, a song, a story, a podcast, a blog post, a news broadcast, or whatever suits you) to explain what you learned or what you think about what you learned
10. Publish it
11. Solve a problem
12. Make an informed decision
13. Ask more questions
14. Use what you learn to help make the world a better place
15. Explore a new Web 2.0 tool for learning
16. Share it
17. Connect/collaborate with someone in another school, another county, another state, another nation (how could you do that?)
18. Look at your information from a different perspective
19. Have fun with it
20. Do it all over again and again…

And while you’re at it, think about these facts:

• Over 1,000,000 (one million) books are published every year
• Americans have access to over 1,000,000,000,000 (one quadrillion) web pages and 200+ cable TV networks
• More video was uploaded to YouTube in the past two months than if ABC, NBC,and CBS had aired new content 24/7, 365 days a year since 1948
• The average American teen sends 2,272 text messages a month
• Mobile devices (cell phones, etc) will be the world’s primary connection tool to the Internet in 2020.

(Source: Did You Know 4.0 video by Scott McLeod, Karl Fisch, Laura Bestler, XPLANE, and The Economist)

In other words, there’s more information being generated today, and at a faster rate, than ever before. Almost anyone can produce websites, write blogs, and make videos, including students.

This means that is is more important than ever for students and adults alike to have the skills to navigate to the right information, critically evaluate it for usefulness, accuracy, and reliability – filtering out bias and inaccuracies, and use it to make informed decisions, solve problems, create new products, generate new ideas, and engage in intelligent discussions – whether face-to-face or online.

Be ready. Be smart. Be information literate