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"If students can Google it..."

5/17/2017

4 Comments

 
The other night, my son was working on writing a few sentences for a school assignment. If you haven't followed along, he's in first grade; It was after dinner. He was at the table, my wife was upstairs with my youngest son to help him get bathed and ready for bed, and I was washing the dishes.

"Daddy, how do I spell dinosaur?"
"Daddy, how do I spell older?"
"Daddy, how do I spell paleontologist?"

As I continued to answer him with correct spellings, the thought came crashing through: why don't I just give him my phone and let Siri help him?

This has been our barometer of good questions, hasn't it? After all, if Google, Siri, or Alexa can answer the questions we have posed on our test, then clearly we are asking low-level questions and should not assess students on them.

People have even voiced their perceived support of the idea, with blog posts in favor of it and even a bit of dissent that is worth reading:
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Yes, my son can ask Google, Siri, Alexa, or a plethora of other services to help him with his spelling. He can also ask Wolfram, a calculator, or even Google for answers to his math facts. 

There are plenty of times where I will search online for the solution to a problem, yet it can also be a hindrance to me getting there quicker, more efficiently, or with a more unique approach. Knowing that I can find an answer online doesn't make the question invalid; it makes it accessible.

However, knowing how to graph a line helps me graph a system much more efficiently. Knowing how to estimate a square root helps me find a diagonal and a hypotenuse. Knowing how to add decimals helps me efficiently complete a bunch of tasks.

What I don't want from these tweets and thoughts from respected people online is that your test shouldn't be Google-able. I want my children to be curious, yes, and I also want them to know how to spell without carrying a dictionary, compute without the dependence of a calculator, and problem-solve without the need for the Internet.

My hope is that you want the same for your children and students.

Happy "Go ahead... Google it" Fishing
4 Comments
Stacey
5/18/2017 06:04:35 am

I have two thoughts on Googlable questions. First, I agree with you completely. In your son's case, there is value to struggling through problems that seem easy to grown-ups because he is little. In fact, here's an article about invented spelling, the task your son was struggling with http://mobile.edweek.org/c.jsp?cid=25920011&item=http%3A%2F%2Fapi.edweek.org%2Fv1%2Fblog%2F59%2F%3Fuuid%3D71813 . To add to the conversation, in my HS English class, I regularly ask my students questions that are easily Googlable, but tell them that because I value creative and insightful thinking, the Google answer only gets a C. For example, I teach Lord of the Flies and so does everyone else in America. Yesterday, we had a Socratic Seminar on it and if the students Google Lord of the Flies analysis they could come up with a lot of ideas. Instead, one group talked about how the island was a Garden of Eden, killing the kids/boys was eating the apple, and when they were rescued, the naval officer was God because Ralph finally felt shame. Then Ralph makes an act of confession. It was amazing! We need to remember that Google isn't itself a God with all the answers. We need to teach students to be critical thinkers all the time, even when Googling.

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John Stevens link
5/18/2017 08:35:26 am

Stacey,

Thank you for stopping by to share.I love how you framed this in terms of your English class and Lord of the Flies. Cliff Notes have been around for a long time, yet English teachers have been finding ways to pair that existence with low level and deeper thinking.

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Matt Vaudrey link
5/18/2017 10:14:06 am

The themes of "best tool for the job" and "build students into complex thinkers" is present here. There is wisdom in decrying the "all computable things are bad" dichotomy, and the <a href="https://twitter.com/MrVaudrey/status/864970781494697984">full thread of tweets</a> offers some context for the one you've pulled in the post.

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john stevens link
5/18/2017 10:23:23 am

Agreed. My pushback on many of the cries to get rid of the Google-able questions is that looking up information takes time, and if we can memorize or use intuition of experience to speed up the process, we can be more effective.

In your thread, which I appreciated, you were talking about the state bird of Louisianna. In this case, it's ridiculous, and has been ever since we were doing the research in Encyclopedias. Google didn't make the task obsolete; it just made the task quicker to execute. I especially appreciated the extension questions you asked in the thread, namely these: https://twitter.com/MrVaudrey/status/864974389611081729
(by the way, HTML doesn't work in Weebly comments)

Thanks for stopping by to share and clarify.

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