Teaching Elementary Students How to Evaluate Information They Find Online

After a 10-year hiatus, coming back to the classroom has been a major adjustment in many ways. One particularly stark difference is the prevalence of technology: When I left, we had a shared iPad cart for the school and four Apple computers in the back of the room. Since then, our classrooms have gone through a pandemic, countless curriculum adoptions, a robust Wi-Fi set-up, and a device (possibly two) for every student.

Because of this shift in technology, it is now critical to teach and reteach procedures and expectations for online success. In my classroom, I use digital citizenship mini-lessons to reinforce expectations and strategies that will help my students thrive in a digital world.

Setting the Foundation for Digital Citizenship

I spend the first few weeks of school teaching and then reinforcing my expectations for behavior and scholarly habits, including digital citizenship. I like to start with mini-lessons from a trusted source like Common Sense Education. I start with broader topics that I know my students will need to understand, and then over the year I identify gaps and opportunities for more specific mini-lessons. This year, we’ve explored topics including media literacy, copyright and fair use, artificial intelligence (AI) literacy, online safety, social media, and media balance.  

Identifying MIsinformation Online

With such an influx of content creators and the ease of creating sophisticated-looking websites, students and adults alike tend to believe what they see online. One of my favorite ways to teach media literacy is through a fake-website activity during our research unit. While teaching students how to conduct online research, I purposely pull up a fictitious website—my favorite website to use for this is the Pacific Northwest tree octopus—and ask students to help me find information on this fictitious animal.

In my 20 years of using this website, I have never had a student question the authenticity of the resource. After a few minutes of writing notes and reading the website for information, I tell them that this website is fictitious. Then, I show them the clues I found on this website and strategies I used to decide that it was not a reliable resource to use for my research. The students get a kick out of being fooled, and they learn a valuable lesson on how to evaluate credible websites.  

Recognizing Bias in Images

In addition to evaluating online sources, I’ve used a variety of projects to teach my students how to safely and effectively interact with AI, supporting their digital citizenship skills. One project has been using Adobe Express, a simple graphic design tool that is free for K–12 students in the U.S., to create images and discuss how bias shows up in these generated images.

In the beginning of the year, students work on a Scholarly Habits poster about themselves where they create an AI image of themselves doing a scholarly habit. By trying to create images of themselves, they learn the fine art of prompt engineering. As they work, they learn that the output doesn’t always match what they are looking for. This gives me an opportunity to talk about the inherent bias and possible hallucinations that can result from using AI.

Students learn firsthand about the many facets of this complicated tool. During a gallery walk of their finished projects, the students mentioned that the pencils in all of our images have no eraser. They pointed out that there are two sharpened ends on every pencil in every image. When trying to create images of themselves, they had a hard time finding students of color or Asian descent. They struggled to find hair that matched the hair on their heads, since all of the images created had the same long, flowy locks of hair or no hair at all.

Recognizing Erroneous Answers

In addition to Adobe Express, I have used other apps to create a chatbot to demonstrate some of the ways in which generative AI tools can have inaccurate or incomplete information. During a writing lesson on natural disasters, we asked a chatbot for help with multiple steps in the writing process. Students interacted with the chatbot, asking for information about natural disasters, and found that they couldn’t get a definitive answer.

One student asked for feedback on his introductory paragraph, and the chatbot didn’t recognize that he had already added his thesis statement, stating that “earthquakes were one of Earth’s greatest natural disasters.” Another student requested more information on earthquakes, and it simply repeated the same facts that were already in the student’s work. While the chatbot gave good feedback overall, I took this opportunity to teach students to be critical of what the chatbot said, just in case it wasn’t accurate or helpful.

For teachers, it is critical to teach students how to thrive in a connected world, using digital spaces in safe and effective ways. By doing so, we are preparing them for an unknown future that looks very bright.