TEACHING IN 'GOOGLE' ERA (do we need teacher if we can ask 'google'?)

A good teacher is more interested in teaching you to think.
The answers to life's dilemmas are seldom as easy as google.

Use google as a teaching tool--one of the most important points of a good education is how to research (phrase your google query) and how to separate the wheat from the crap--one of the major problems with the interweb is all the conflicting 'factoids' that are posted there.

How do you separate the supported from the unsupportable?

Rap

A good teacher doesn't always have all the answers. She needs to know where to get the answers. I have never had a problem with students because the majority of my students have been preschool aged and can't read yet.

You still need a teacher to explain the google results. Google can and will only take a person part of the distance. A teacher becomes the real life interactive feature which Google doesn't have.

Bingo. There is a lotta stuff out there that's garbage, but it's got a good SEO ranking and so it shoots to the top of search results. Students need to learn about objective, reliable sources of information.

I see.
I often get problems (the interesting ones actually) in my class. They are teenagers, 13-15 years old. Some of them are special need. Once one of them said to me, "Miss, the genius one does not go to school. Do you know why I go to school? Because I am stupid. And u have to make me smart! So, how could if there were a teacher who cant answer his student's question???"

Couldnt agree more with u
THX

Some folks are now avoiding their doctors and attempting to treat themselves for a variety of illnesses. Not a good idea. There is a tremendous amount of misinformation on google and in the long haul, I'd advise using books for information.

i know what u mean. google does not always provide the right answer. But, at least, it answers.

I think you can use this as a motivator -- congratulate them for stumping you if they manage it!

The end result is most important, and if this is a way for them to learn more, great.

You can make use of it in both directions -- encourage them to ask questions (they'll look up [and learn] all kinds of obscure stuff to try to stump you) and then also show them how to verify something using Google (i.e. the perils of Wikipedia and not just accepting the top result on Google, whatever that may be).

I did that with my ESL students and a dictionary, I challenged 'em to stump me with vocabulary and it took a while but there was a lot of laughter and they learned a bunch of words! (And this was in the nascent days of Google so Google can't be blamed -- dictionaries and encyclopedias have been around for a long time.)

There are a lot of things you cannot teach over google.
Sports, handicrafts, cooking, languages and make people think and come to conclusions.

Google does have it's limitations. Is it here to stay? I doubt it.

By the way, I don't think you can learn how to dance on Google. Can you?

and you certainly cannot learn how to make small talk or converse.

I have been reading history for more than 50 years now, and i have an excellent memory, as well as having books at my disposal which provide the sources for the information contained in them. When online, i often use a search engine or wikipedia to verify spellings or dates--but the amount of incorrect information from web sites, including wikipedia, is just astonishing. It's not that the information is necessarily willfully wrong (such as when wikipedia was suffering from rogue editing), but that people retail what they've heard, and incorrect information gets repeated again and again. This happens not only online, but in print, too.

I once read a book about the development of the aircraft which became the B17 bomber. In that book, there was a story to the effect that some American daylight bomber crews dropped bombs in the center of Brussels by mistake, and they were sure that they would be courtmartialed as a result, because of a regulation which would hold them responsible for bombing "friendlies." But then the briefer told them before their next mission that Nazis had been living in the houses which were bombed, so they weren't going to be courtmartialed. Nice story, but the author didn't give a source. I read the same story later in a policy study of the Ninth U. S. Army Air Force's bombing missions--but when i checked, that author listed the author of the book on the B17 as the source, and that had not had a source. I've since read the story in two more books--one listing no source, and the other listing the policy study as a source.

Once, intending to post that story online, but not without a caveat, i looked for an online source. Well, i found the story online alright--and it was given as an example of an "urban legend" that could have been dispelled right away with a little fact checking. There was no such regulation in the United States Army Air Force that would send an aircrew to trial for dropping bombs on civilians in a friendly country. This i found at a web site devoted to the history of the United States Army Air Force ( the U.S. Air Force did not come into being until late 1947). So, i didn't make the post, but i did find a "contact us" link for the U.S. Air Force history section, and sent them an e-mail. I got a reply to the effect that the story could not have been true, that there never was such a regulation in the United States Army Air Force.

Online or in print, the reliability of the sources is what matters. Online or in print, unsourced information is never reliable--you need to get the facts from reliable sources.

I agree with all so far.

I'll also add that even now, quite a few years into the google era, I can be surprised by what information still is not available via google, in fields that I know something about. If that is true for me, I posit it is so for others with other expertise, so I think there is a lot left in the presently ungoogleable information stack. Human knowledge can be very complex, densely layered, and interconnected to varying subject matter, and learning how to observe and think is a lifetime project.

Whatever its limitations, I'm still glad to have google at my fingertips.

Even books have incorrect information. Back before the internet, I did a year's worth of library research on matters that interested me, and found that I could trace a pattern of wrong information from author to author. It was amusing at the time.



edit - reading later posts, I see Setanta already covered this aspect.

believe it or not, a student of mine has English as his second language and he never lives in English speaking countries. When I ask him where he gets his English, he said he learns it from game and you-tube. Wow!!!

thanks for your sharing.