Intel Module 3 Blog: Using the Internet to support teaching and learning

How can I use the Internet to support my teaching and students' learning? Honestly, I wouldn't know how to teach without the Internet anymore. First, I began using the Internet to find lessons and ideas for lessons about twelve years ago (can it be that long?) when we received access at school. I found such great ideas for higher level thinking and student involvement. Then the teacher librarian and I began creating web quests for students as part of projects (she used a guided web quest creator, and I am totally blanking on the name right now). Now, I belong to online sites like the English Companion Ning and a Teacher Librarian Wiki and I get ideas from those sites as well.
The more students used the Internet, the more I recognized that I had to teach them to use it responsibly and to identify whether or not information was "relilable." Even before I was certified as a Teacher Librarian, I started creating lessons on website authenticity and how to tell if the author was trustworthy, biased, etc. Then, as a TL, it became clear that students really had no idea how to tell who a website author was, what bias was, etc., so I started to really develop lessons for Information Literacy. Once we began to talk to students about what was appropriate for scholarly research, how to use keyword searches, etc., we really started to see a lot less "off task" and inappropriate behavior on the Internet. The coolest thing to me was the behavior of the seniors I worked with recently--they turned their senior research papers into digital documentaries--using pictures, video, etc. We heard a lot of conversation from the students about whether or not their pictures were appropriate, what websites they should use, etc. It was clear that they knew the difference and were analyzing the Internet on their own