 Good afternoon everyone and welcome to another edition of Westlake High School Tech Talk. Today, I'm joined by librarian Caroline Foote and we will be doing a session on research vetting and fake news. These are pretty hot topics in the world of Education Day and also the general world today in terms of what news out there is considered fake, what is considered bias. We're going to explore some research out there. We're going to explore some different ideas about how we look at news media. And then Caroline's going to give us some input on how we utilize some tools here at Westlake High School to help our students find proper sources as unbiased as we can find them and also sources from either side of the spectrum when we talk about political bias. Before we launch into that, I just want to let y'all know that we do have some archive sessions for our Tech Talks on YouTube that is EANS EdTech. If you search EANS EdTech on YouTube, you can access our channel. We have several, Lisa Johnson and myself have several webinars that we've done over the past couple of months and we really appreciate you guys coming on and look forward to more opportunities to do these for our students and parents and staff as well. So the topic of the day is research vetting and fake news. So let's launch right into it. The first portion we'll be looking at, fake news and media bias, kind of defining what that is and analyzing what the research says out there and what we can do as consumers of media to make sure that we're getting the best sources out there. As I told you, my name is Chris Hansen. I do work at Westlake High School here in Austin, Texas. I am an instructional technology specialist. You can email me at WHS EdTech at EANSISD.net. And I am also found on Twitter at Tejas Hansen. Carolyn Foote is joining me from the library next door. She's made the big walk over. Our offices are about 40 feet apart. She's the lead librarian here at Westlake High School. She can be reached at Seafood at EANSISD.net. And also besides techno library, she can also be reached at WHS Library Rocks on Twitter. So today's agenda, first, we will look at defining fake news and media bias. What does the research out there tell us exactly what that is? How are we encountering this? And how can we do a better idea of analyzing our news sources for bias and making choices on what we believe, repost on social media and from our student standpoint, what they include in their research. We'll summarize our findings, draw some conclusions from today. Hopefully, maybe just open up some more questions. And then we are going to focus on research solutions. That's our big push today and why I wanted to include Carolyn as she is our lead librarian here. She does influence students across campus and how they research. And so I wanted to show you all some of the tools that we use here. So if you are part of the Westlake community, how you can get your students using your children using these tools. And if you're not part of the Westlake community, then maybe some tools that you may not have heard of that can help you in your own district or at your own campus. So first and foremost, when looking at this topic, I asked the question specifically, what is fake news and what is media bias? When we look at fake news in particular, fake news is defined recently by an article or research study put out titled social media and fake news in the 2016 election. This was submitted and printed in the Journal of Economic Perspectives by Hunt Alcott, who is an Associate Professor of Economics at New York University and Matthew Gents Cowell. Hope I'm not butchering that last name, Gents Cowell, Professor of Economics at Stanford. And you can find this at the web link, web.stanford.edu. Gents Cowell, that is the campus that Gents Cowell works at. So the definition of fake news is defined as news articles that are intentionally and verifiably false and could mislead readers. Lately, fake news has been in and out of the the media focus for a variety of reasons. It is one of those kind of buzzwords floating around the political spectrum and media in general. So it's important to understand that there are various ways of using that term. Fake news is being used not only to identify news articles that are intentionally and verifiably false, but also some individuals are using that term to identify media sources that they may not may not agree with. So it is important to understand that we will talk about media bias. So when we talk about bias, obviously, as humans, we all have our own biases, but it's important to understand that when we discuss fake news, we are talking about those articles that are specifically intentionally and verifiably false. They are not real. There's been a lot of talk about possible meddling in the political election of 2016 with different countries influencing voters through social media by posting articles that may not be true. Those articles have been identified and proven to not be true. And so that's what this study, this social media and fake news in the 2016 election study focuses on. Those specific articles that they can identify as absolutely not true, not just things they thought may not be true, but things that were not true. When we look at media bias, the definition I'm going to use is basically the definition of media and the definition of bias. So when we talk about media, we're talking about news reporting, news agencies. When we talk about bias, we're discussing prejudice in favor of or against one thing or another. I do want to bring up two terms when we talk about media bias. These terms are discussed in a Larry Atkins book, Skewed, A Critical Thinker's Guide to Media Bias. This is one of the books that I looked at when researching this topic. And he brings up two terms that you may have heard in in lately in the media, which are advocacy, journalism and echo chamber. Advocacy journalism is when a reporter gives an opinion or point of view and uses stories to back it up. So it is utilizing facts to back up what could conceivably be an opinion. So obviously there's a lot of facts in the world around any topic and how do you use those facts? What's which facts do you choose and why? The other term was echo chamber. And echo chamber is definitely something I hear on social media a lot, which is the tendency for people to get news and opinions from sources that echo or reinforce their own similar viewpoints. So we will discuss some of the research and findings around different media sources. What kind of media bias they have been found to have? Again, a lot of these research studies are biased in themselves. So this is quite, Carolyn and I were just talking about this a moment ago. This is quite the rabbit hole if you really look at it. And I don't want to leave you with a feeling that basically all news is useless or anything like that, but just some tools to be an engaged and active person that's taking in these media sources and being able to look at them and understand what it is you're looking at and look for some key things that we hope will help you and your students. The key thing was, sorry, switch to the next slide. So a key question that I came up with is is news trustworthy? So that is kind of guiding question in this first segment of the research before we get into some tools that can help let us find some sources that are trustworthy. We're looking at primarily media outlets and news agencies. Is it actually trustworthy or is it something we should just be skeptical of? Some other questions that I came up with in the study that I'll look at in the following slides are what role does bias play in news? What do agencies, why do agencies post fake or bias news stories? And how are we exposed to fake news? So these are some driving questions in the research leading up to this webinar. We'll go with the latter question first. So when we talk about fake news, how are we exposed to fake news? So how do we come across this? Obviously, nobody out there, well, I hope nobody out there would actively go and search out fake news articles. So how do we encounter these articles? And how can we do a better job of avoiding them? So we will turn to the the Stanford article, the social media and fake news in the 2016 election for this question in particular. The study found that as we find our news, more times than not, we're finding our fake news articles through social media. People aren't actually going in Google searching or web browsing to find these fake news articles. They are actively posted through social media. So this is the main driver for those fake news articles. It's through sites such as Facebook and Twitter so that people can click on those there. Again, 10 percent of the top news sites were accessed through social media. So people are more likely to access top news sites through a browser search or actually typing in the website individually as opposed to going through something like Facebook or Twitter to access those sites. According to a few research study in 2017, 66 percent of U.S. adults reported using a social media site like Facebook. So the vast majority of U.S. adults are reporting that they are actually using these social media sites. And then 45 percent of those admitted to getting news on the site. I am a Facebook user and a Twitter user. And I would probably assume that that 45 percent number is deflated. I think a lot of people aren't actually understanding or admitting that they're accessing news on the social media sites. If you're a social media user, you know, it's hard to avoid those new articles. So I'm not sure how they're utilizing their stream and Twitter or Facebook, but I would assume that number is probably deflated just because people not fully understanding what the question was being asked. But more saying, of course, I don't get my news that way. I get it in other ways, but they are obviously seeing those new news articles rolling through on their feed. Again, it's hard to avoid that in most social media sites today. So why do agencies post fake news? This is a big question. So what would drive an individual or organization to create fake news? And so looking at that, we have to look at the economics of the situation. So going through some research and some personal experiences with ad revenue on websites, it's about 10 cents to a dollar per click. If you're looking at AdSense, Google AdSense, which is kind of the biggest online ad organization there is, you can get up to $10 per click. But we'll say on average, about the average is going to be about 10 cents to a dollar, so about 50 cents per click. So there's an economic incentive, a financial incentive for individuals and organizations to post clickable news articles. Sometimes the news just isn't that clickable. Maybe there's not a lot going on. Maybe it's not that interesting. So to spice things up, they could embellish stories or actually create fake news stories for people to be able to click on those, share those, and they get more revenue based on people going to their websites and accessing those advertisements in the website. So the financial reason is a big reason why it has been found that these agencies would be creating these. I don't have the facts and figures off hand, but I know there was an NPR segment recently about how much money could have been made based on the clicks that were done on the fake news sites and just the ones we knew about. So just the ones that have been collected and analyzed. And it was a pretty vast amount of money that could have been collected just the 2016 election and off these particular fake news articles. So very interesting way to make some money, not the most honest way, but definitely shows the incentive for people to create these fake news articles and create these clickable headlines, much like the title of this webinar was. And so our next question was why why do some news agencies or news stories seem biased? And for this portion, I turned to two books and I chose these two books for different reasons. The first book left turn how liberal media bias distorts the American mind. I actually found this book through a Freakonomics podcast. So this book has a and Carolyn, I was discussing this as well. This book has a very spicy title and it's very easy to judge this book by its cover. And look at it and look at it as a conservative trying to destroy the the mainstream media and show how it's liberally biased, which I will discuss and try to put that in just a moment. In contrast to left turn, the book skewed by Larry Atkins, a critical thinkers guide to media bias, was more of a research study that was written to analyze the current it was written this past year, how we currently look at media, media bias. It looks at some different research studies. And the way these two authors are contrasted is Tim grows close. Is it an admitted conservative and Larry Atkins is an admitted liberal. So I wanted to make sure and have a balanced approach when looking at these things while the actual content of the books somewhat is different as left turn is less of a lit review and more of a actual study and actual quantitative research study skewed is more of the lit review and analysis of studies. So in left turn to start with Tim grows close, looks at media bias and he basically creates a way to quantify bias and not just from media, but obviously as we're looking at politics as the basis of bias, he starts with politicians. So the way he looks at it is if he is able to quantify the position being a liberal or conservative of a politician based on their voting records, then he can contrast that with media articles based on language used. So the way that a media outlet, the words that a media outlet uses, the articles that it prints, he basically feeds all that into a computer system and contrast that against the the scoring that he's developed for politicians. So there are two main points that he looks at for his quantitative research, one being slant quotients, which is the media bias and the other being political quotients. If you don't want to take the time to read the book, totally understand it is if you're really into economics and algorithms and studies, then I highly recommend it. If you're not, go ahead and go to his website, Tim grows close dot com and he does actually have a breakdown of this research, how he developed this this study. Then, of course, you can actually take the quiz yourself and see if it lines up to where how you basically ask you a series of questions that were actually legislation and ask you how how you would vote if you were a congressman. And from that, he develops your own political quotient. So as we look at his research, some things pop out to Tim grows close. First and foremost, he breaks down some of our media. He does not do every single media source in the United States as he states this would take way too long, but just to give you a couple, three main ones. So Fox News, CNN and NBC, the slant question for those, you can see zero being extremely conservative, 100 being extremely liberal. You can see that Fox News, he found had a 39.7 percent slant quotient, CNN, 56 percent NBC, having a 61.6 percent. These studies were done around 2012. So this may have changed throughout time or our perceptions of how these media outlets may be biased one way or another may have changed. But this is based on his computer models and his research when feeding the information into these models. He did find that the average slant quotient of the top 19 media outlets were 69, 65.9 percent, which he used to basically solidify his hypothesis that the media is liberally slanted. That 65.9 would be above that 50 percent mark that would be considered neutral. Again, this is a admittedly conservative person creating a computer model and feeding information into it and finding this information or finding these results. But as he continues to lay out in the book, I'd say about half of the book is him defending his stance and using different sources, including professors from throughout the nation, most of which are admittedly liberal to back up his research and his model in terms of how he arrived at these conclusions. So a very interesting article on the slant one way or another or an interesting book on the slant one way or another of the different media agencies. Again, checking out that website, I'll go back to it. Timgroseclose.com gives you a better idea of what I'm discussing and what I've summarized and skewed. Larry Atkins comes out a little different in terms of he is not creating his own research analysis, but rather researching research, more of a lit review in terms of how how is media biased? He does arrive at some different conclusions. He again brings up those two terms, advocacy, journalism and echo chamber. And he did find at one point in the book, he brings up a 2011 media matter study that found the opposite of Timgroseclose, which is 60 percent 60 percent of American newspapers printed conservative columnists. This was derived by looking at the political affiliations and what the columnists admitted were their political leanings in 2011 by that media matter study. So it was interesting that there are different ways of looking at media bias in terms of what is the individual admitting and in terms of what are we actually putting out there, printing the English language. One word that he did focus on is objectivity in the beginning of the book. And I found this particularly interesting. Objectivity was actually a word that was in the code of ethics of the Society of Professional Journalists. And this word was actually dropped a few years ago. So they pulled it out of the code of ethics. And the reason why they said was because of the word objectivity tended to mean different things to different people, which is a little ironic. So it just shows you even in the journalist themselves are having trouble understanding what is the true term of objectivity. And maybe a kind of common thread that you're seeing here is this idea of bias, this idea of objectivity. These things are really based on the individual and how we perceive them. So in skewed, he does launch into an analysis of the media themselves. And one thing he looks at is who owns media outlets. And he finds in 1983 that 90 percent of US media was owned by 50 companies, which gives a pretty wide array of types of people in organizations that are influencing what news gets to us. And in 2011, that same 90 percent was owned by six companies, those companies being listed on the slide, GE News, Corps of Disney, Viacom, Time Warner and CBS. This is not to say that GE or CBS has a political agenda. I don't think that can be proven by his research, but he's basically saying that when you put the R information in the hands of a few as opposed to the many, they were getting a narrower scope on what is actually going on in the world and not only what is going on, but how to view what is going on. So things like headlines, things like news clippings, things like time on air as being influenced by fewer and fewer organizations than before. And this could possibly lead to more bias. A big number that stuck out at me besides this six number right here was the actual revenue. So in, reported in 2010, those six agencies reported 275.9 billion dollars in total revenue. That is from advertising revenue. So perhaps we can look at news media outlets as not necessarily being an objective reporter of what's going on, but more of a engager of the individual so that the more eyes on their news articles or news stories might be the more eyes on their advertising agencies. So this number of the study in what Atkins tries to point out is it's less of a notifying the public and more of a revenue generator. How much money can you make off of it? Again, that does not influence or that does not say that media is slanted one way or the other. A little bit different than gross closest book, but more points to the fact that perhaps we should look at these agencies as companies, as revenue generators, as opposed to objective news reporters. Another hot topic, not only in social media, but I've seen around school are the idea that you can take all the news agencies or a portion of them and put them on an infographic or a chart, put a couple of variables in place and we should be able to chart them and see how do these different agencies line up. So this is an example of that. This is from all generalizations or false.com. This is developed by Vanessa Taro. She's a patent lawyer from Denver, so no real interest in a news agency. I'm not sure her portfolio, but I'd assume she's doing this simply out of curiosity. So basically what she's done is she's created this chart and put these different agencies in different places and I'll talk a little bit about what she's done here. You can see these rectangles, first and foremost, and these are described right here. Green being the top, which would be news. Yellow, fair interpretations of the news. Orange, unfair interpretations. And red, she describes as nonsense damaging to public discourse. We'll talk a little bit about how she arrives at these conclusions. You can see that most extreme liberal is on the left side with most extreme conservative being on the right. Neutral, minimal partisan biases or balance of biases being in the middle. And then we also have fact reporting. So this kind of goes along with the triangles. The top here being actual facts being reported. And the bottom being contains inaccurate and fabricated information. So how she basically ranked these different organizations. She did the fact reporting based on fact checkers such as PolitiFact. So all these different agencies, she looked at several articles from each and ran them and researched them through different fact checkers to see how they ranked in terms of fact checking. Bias detection was ranking based on perceived bias. So this is, I'm not sure, I looked for this in her blog to see how, what exactly her computation was or how she quantified this, but I couldn't get a good sense of it. And then the quality is the level of detail and analysis. Again, this is Vanessa Otero's own analysis of what the quality of these new agencies is. So this is just an example of one of the infographics that are kind of going around and how we are looking at our different news sources these days. So one thing she did, and it stuck out to me, was that she took different articles from different agents. She looked at the same story or same event and looked at different news sources and saw how they reported this. So I assume this is something that you or I could do as well. So I actually did this. And I did this yesterday. I took a pretty hot topic in the world today, which is Will Trump fire Mueller? So this is a pretty politicized question that I just Google searched. And I did that. And I tagged, in each Google search I tagged a particular agency. First one being Washington Post, which is described as Otero as being a, I'm sorry, the first one being Palmer Report, which is described as being kind of a biased liberal source. MSNBC being a mid-left. Washington Post being more of a center-left. The Hill being more of a center-right. Washington Times being a mid-right. And Infowars being a far right or biased right source. And so when I did this, and I'll show you what I found on these screenshots from the different titles. So here we have the Palmer Report, which is described as left bottom by Otero. The title being Donald Trump's Attorneys Show Their Weekend to Robert Mueller. Immediately what stuck out at me was associating the word weak with Donald Trump. Next, MSNBC, which is a posting of one of their live reports. MSNBC is Rick Tyler. Trump is going to fire Robert Mueller, and Republicans will do nothing. The next Washington Post, which is considered left top, how the attacks on Mueller are putting Trump in greater danger. The Hill, right top, Democrats and Trump fire Mueller, and I will fire, and I will vote to fire you, which is a quote from a congressional Democrat. Washington Times considered right mid. Paul Ryan being quoted here, Trump won't fire Mueller. So it was interesting that it brought in another kind of face of the conservative party or the Republican party. And Info Wars considered right bottom from right here in Austin, Texas. CNN panel admits Trump can fire Mueller. So they're actually backing up the assumption that Trump has a constitutional right to fire Robert Mueller based on the CNN panel. And then they have, in the subtitle here, he can get away with it. So just a small analysis, and I'm not sure what the conclusions based on this is. I can definitely see differences in how each news organization is reporting just through the titles, the same question basically put to it, and how that does change as you move from that leftist or liberal side to the more conservative side, and how that the assumptions do change. So in conclusion, fake news and media bias, I must say that researching this topic has probably created more questions than conclusions for myself. There is a lot of information out there. There are a lot of media sources. And the more that I look into things like bias and splant, the more I'm finding that the studies of the studies are particularly biased themselves. So it's hard to get a firm grasp on it. What I can conclude from my own research, looking at these different sources, is that bias is evident even in major news sources. Opinions have become part of the news spectrum. It's hard to recall when the shift happened, but it is based, definitely, a quality of having the 24-hour news cycle on and being able to attract different people and different groups of people. Getting news from multiple sources is definitely recommended. Being able to understand that different sources will report different ways and focus on different things. So looking at different sources as opposed to one source, moving away from that echo chamber, not necessarily that things don't focus on things that back up what we perceive to be true, but looking at different sources and seeing how it's reported. And personally, avoiding social media as a news source, based on that 2016 study of fake news, it seems like with 40% of the fake news visits coming from social media, it seems like social media is not necessarily a verifiable way to get at factual news sources. So being able to find those credible news sources, again balancing out what sources we're looking at in terms of bias, everything's a little biased, as much as things try to be straight factual. And I guess I wanted to conclude before I pass it off to Caroline with a quote that I just loved from Larry Adkins' book. This quote is actually from Kevin Whitmire, or Kyle Whitmire, who's a state political commentator for the Alabama Media Group. And he writes, there is media bias, but it's not the liberal or conservative kind most folks look for. It's the need for conflict and the lust for the freak show. It favors the weird, the outlandish, and the out of place. And that will be my final conclusion that perhaps being aware that media organizations are simply another form of entertainment, and after the same thing that all forms of entertainment are same in our eyes, and being able to market that to advertisers. So with all this laid out there, I wanted to pass it off to Caroline Foot, again, Westlake High School Librarian, who's gonna talk to us, probably follow up on some of my stuff, and then also talk to us about some of the tools and tools for our students in ways that we have our students get some credible sources for their research projects. Carol? Okay. Good afternoon, everyone. And I am Caroline Foot. I'm the high school librarian here at Westlake, and also the district librarian. And as Chris said, you can follow me on Twitter at WHS Library Rocks, or my school email. That's another way you can follow up with me. So one of the, as you can see from what Chris had to say, the whole issue of news media and bias is both a hot topic right now and a very complex topic. So how can we help our children and our students navigate this world that is very difficult for even us to navigate? I think a lot of it, more than dealing with technology skills, involves thinking skills on the part of our students. So as parents and as educators, there are a lot of things that you can do to help your child navigate this space a little more effectively. And then I'm also going to share some tools that we have in the library in some ways. We try to help students navigate these issues. So one thing you can do with your kids at home or with your students is help them make some distinction between all these terms and Chris spent some time defining fake news and terms around that. So helping them understand how the terms are being thrown around because right now in popular media and students slang, you really can tell that a lot of students are using these terms in very sloppy ways. Fake news does not mean news we do not agree with. Fake news means news that it's false or fake. There's news that is incorrect because the reporters maybe made an error. There's propaganda that's meant to influence somebody intentionally. Some pieces are op-ed pieces or opinion pieces, so they obviously have the point of view of the writer. And then there are pieces that are meant to be more factual. So just helping talk through them as you watch the news, read news articles, watch the news together, look at their Snapchat feeds, news feeds, wherever they're getting news from, just helping them kind of navigate all the different vocabulary that's involved and make sure maybe they're using the words in more precise ways because the only way we reshape our language is by using it more correctly. There's other strategies you can use at home with students or in the classroom. One is definitely think about reading a wide variety of sources or watching a wide variety of news sources. There's a lot of opportunity to discuss with students if you flip back and forth between the major news channels and the cable news channels during a news hour and point out how is each channel covering a particular story that's hot in the news right now, a story that's hot in the news right now, like maybe the BBC, because we tend to get just a very western perspective on the news and I think it broadens their understanding if kids also reach out and look at other kinds of sources. And we need to also be looking at the sources our students are using. So if they're getting their news from Snapchat or Instagram, as adults we need to take some time and ask them to explain that to us. How are they finding news on there? What news are they looking at and learn a little bit about it ourselves so we can have a coherent discussion with them. Another recommendation I always make is reminding students to use the about pages on websites. One of the things I've noticed in the classroom is when students are doing research, especially on issues where there might be pros and cons or there might be nonprofits on either side of the issue, is that they don't always understand when they're using like a foundation's website or an organization's website that has a particular bias. So one thing you can teach them is how to click on the about page and read about what the organization stands for. And then also the next step is to verify that in a couple of outside sources. So if they are on a website for a particular group advocating for, I'll pick on libraries for example, then they can both read the about page about that organization but then they can Google that organization and see how other sources are discussing it. And that way they get a better sense of is this source really too biased for the type of assignment they have in front of them or is the data that's going to be found there useful for what they're working on. One of the things that the Stanford study that Chris mentioned touches on is that students that correctly verified fake sources tended to verify it by looking in a third source. So encouraging students not only to look at the webpage they're looking at but to vet it by Googling it or looking on Wikipedia or verifying it in some outside secondary source. Now if it's a very popular source even if it's misinformation they have to be careful about where they're looking and that's when they might want to turn to fact-checking sites helping your students learn about different fact-checking sites or if they know the sites and you don't having them teach you about them. Sideslikesnotes.com is a commonly used one and there are numerous others but they'll end up pointing people in the direction of the facts. Politifact is another one that some people use but some newspapers have fact-checking sites and again they are attempting to be objective they're attempting to verify the facts some of those may have a slight slant one way or the other but the fact-checking sites tend to be best at kind of dispelling folks' news and completely fake news. So that's another strategy to help kids with. If they're actually doing research there's some strategies I'd like to suggest too. Sometimes they have trouble refining their research question to begin with like it's way too broad you'll notice your child's doing research on something and the term they're typing in is just so broad like World War II and they're searching Google for World War II they're going to get millions of hits on that. So one way you can help your child is asking them some why questions there's one technique called 5WISE and basically you say well why did the war happen and let them answer well why is that important? So you keep persisting with some why's and you're trying to drill down into what they already know to help them come up with a better question to begin with. There's lots of other methods for helping them refine their question just talking to them about what they're trying to find so a lot of this is preparing them before they jump online and it's strategies that hopefully teachers are using as well but definitely you can use it at home and really help them talk through and verbalize their thinking. Brainstorming synonyms for terms another issue we often find is that students maybe have been assigned a topic that they don't know that much about so the way they're searching is kind of omitting a lot of information because they don't know the synonyms for what they're actually researching. So helping them brainstorm some common synonyms for topics they're researching is very very helpful to them finding more correct information and more pertinent information and this especially relates to things with sort of bias issues because sometimes terms are used for example by conservatives that might be termed differently by liberal news agencies so global warming, climate change, climate science those are all very charged terms for example and so the different kinds of sites might either not even use those terms and so trying to help students think through that if it's a hot topic especially but even in general if it's a scientific term that they've been assigned they may just have no context for it so the next step is to have them read some sort of overview article whether they go to the library we have online encyclopedias that I'll be showing you in a minute or by having them use a site like Wikipedia just to get a broad overview of the topic to yes this is a librarian recommending Wikipedia to get a broad overview of the topic to get some keywords that they might use for searching further it helps them get a more educated start to doing research and then another thing you can do is really help direct your children at home towards using more reputable sources especially like library databases which are vast and because the state pays for a lot of them and the district pays for some other ones it's a vast amount of resources that our students have access to for free through our library and the public library has even more databases than we do and certainly the community public library they can use those as well if they have a library column another thing that studies are finding is that students in college are known to suffer from library anxiety it's actually a condition and students that particularly suffer from this are second language students but also high achieving students and the reason is that they're afraid to look like they don't know how to do something and so helping coach our students and how to ask for human health that librarians are actually there to help them that there are people there that are trained to help them actually helping learn to advocate for themselves and ask questions is really a good skill that any parent can help a child with and teachers can help students with as well and then another research strategy we recommend is students have a lot easier than we did back in the day as teachers like to say but there's online tools now like one we use at school called noodle tools for students to create their bibliographies online they're a lot more accurate and easier than from trying to learn MLA format on their own or for you trying to re-learn it so I will mention that we have access to those as well so how can Westlake High School Library help students so one way we can help is that we have a website and as you can see from this slide here this is a screenshot of our website we have a number of databases that you can access online and students can access up at the top of the database page is a link to noodle tools and each student has an account on noodle tools already they can log in with their Google account if they are part of the district it is a paid site that we subscribe to at the high school on the right side of the noodle tools screen they can log in and I'll show you that in a minute we also have a number of research databases for students to use and I want to explain how I talk to students about that so when you Google information it's basically like if you needed a pair of shoes for you forgot your shoes for your choir concert and you had just an hour between when school was out and the concert so obviously the most efficient place to go is the mall because there's lots of different shoe stores and you can quickly find a pair of shoes and the right color that you need so going to a database is like going to the mall because under that roof of the database there are a lot of different resources they've all been vetted but they're all collected in one place and they all work basically the same way if you're driving from shoe store to shoe store and figuring out where to park and each shoe store is set up differently then that's more like using Google because you're going to a lot of different sites and each time you get to a site you're going to be examining the about page or you're going to be figuring out if it's pertinent or even something you can use and so that's how I strategize with students on how to use the think of the databases so the first two we have are both encyclopedias Worldbook and Britannica encyclopedias and they're as I said great starting point we actually have them elementary level middle school and high school so if your child has a different reading level they can go down to or up to whichever level they need it also has videos and images as well as articles and it's updated all the time as often as Wikipedia not as often but daily and so they're current and have current news on them as well the bottom two databases listed here EBSCO and the Gale databases are both big umbrella databases but they contain many news sources for students so EBSCO has news in context it has Explorer it has academic news sources and so there's a big variety of databases that they can choose from within the EBSCO database the Gale database is used a lot by our students particularly for two sub databases in there one is called opposing viewpoints which has actually designed to have pros and cons of issues so it categorizes editorials and opinion pieces and it will identify articles as having a viewpoint or being sort of a neutral article and then the Gale literary criticism database which we're not really talking about today but offers a vast array of literary criticism and they're doing literature studies Gale also has just regular news and magazine databases and both the EBSCO and Gale have coverage from a week in the future EBSCO goes back now to the 80's so they have full text articles going back a long period of time they're also very up to date because publishers actually release the articles to EBSCO and Gale before they go into print so Time Magazine or Newsweek for example articles will appear on EBSCO a week ahead of when they're actually available in print or online for free so students are actually getting the latest news from those sources so these are all great sources for our students to use when they're in the databases though I do want to remind students and you can do this when you're working with your own children is that a database contains articles from newspapers, magazines pamphlets NPR other radio and video pieces so still within the databases they are going to find opinion pieces that are editorials, letters to the editor, things like that they're going to find news articles and magazine articles which have been vetted because they're editors for news, magazines and magazine articles then they'll also find peer review journals, peer review journals are the highest level of academic work basically to be published in a peer review journal you have to submit your article to other peers like other scientists if you're a scientist and have your methodology reviewed have commentary provided before the journal will ever even publish the article so some of our more academic courses require that students use peer review articles and the place that those are found are within the database and they're basically the highest level of rigor so just being aware of what those are encouraging your students to use them the databases have an option to check a box if you wanted to use a peer review journal that is something that is good for you as a parent to know about this is noodle tools which we just recently purchased so not all of your students may even know that we have this but basically noodle tools allow students to create a project and I've got some sample ones created here and then for each project they can keep note cards they can create a bibliography there's buttons at the top of noodle tools that help them do that they can make a to-do list with due dates and things they can write a paper share it with their teacher so there's a lot of different ways that they can get into noodle tools and as I mentioned before on the right hand of the login screen there's a place for them to login with their school email and just click login it'll ask them if they're a student and then they can log on in and then they'll have a permanent account and it'll keep all their projects and notes and note cards together so I just want you as parents to know that they have this option now we also use this site called Easy Bib which is a free bibliography site but we've noticed that it's the quality of it has gone down over time so we really wanted to provide something that was more accurate for students to use another thing I wanted to mention that as the library that we're doing to help teachers work with your students better on all these issues of correct information and research is we've created a Google classroom each one of our teachers uses Google classroom to send assignments out to their students we've actually created a library Google classroom and invited all the teachers in the high school to join it and then on that site I'm sharing with the teachers like a help video on how to use a database or if you see on the left where it says topics how to use noodle tools a research packet with materials on how to teach research effectively so we can help them support your kids better as well and then the staff of the library of course reaches out and does instruction directly with classes so we go to classrooms and do visits like yesterday I went to a classroom and taught five classes we do a research boot camp with 9th and 10th graders when they start doing research on how to use the database features and how to get conduct better searches and get the nitty gritty details that they want we created this Google classroom we actually help a lot of students through email so they can email myself or Jackie Clifton who's our other librarian and we provide help on the weekends in the evening when students have a question about research or how to get something done so those are just some of the tips I have for helping students navigate the world of information and this highly sensitive environment and I think again I just really want to emphasize that when students conduct research well it's often because they have spent time or teachers spend time with them or their parent thinking through what they're doing having conversations about it having conversations about bias looking at the websites they're using rather than working in isolation and rather than just jumping on the internet the first second they get a research assignment so the more you can help them slow down and do some thinking around their topics and be reflective about different media they're looking at the more critical thinkers they're going to be and the better their in-products in their papers are going to be the thinking in their papers shows that they spent that time ahead of time really thinking through their projects so I want to thank Chris for having me and Chris do you have some final words here all right yeah thank you Caroline for joining us and thank you everybody for viewing this whether you view it live or view it in the archive again YouTube Eens EdTech is where you can find these archive sessions our next session is next week actually March 28th which is a Wednesday we do have assessment prep it is testing season at the high school so we have all our star tests and AP tests SAT, ACT coming up we do have some great tools that we want to share with you guys on how your students can prepare for those tests tools that are either free or provided by the district and on May 3rd we have senior digital transition so we'll be recording a webinar for tools that help seniors transition to the next level whether it be college or career but how they can take everything they've created and done at the high school level digitally with them so we'll be going through that not only to do a live webinar but also to share with teachers and students with some tips to help them get through that transition so thank you again for joining us please reach out we will see you next time thank you