Ontario Cities Research Workshop With Grade 3

You are going to be starting a project on cities in Ontario.

Let’s start by looking at a non-fiction book and learning how to use them for our research.

What is non-fiction?

Table of Contents?

Index?

Now how can we search for information about our city on Google.  Let’s open up our internet browsers and find out.  We can get very specific with our keywords to find key information for our research project.  For example, if we want to answer the question what is the population of Ottawa Ontario, what could my keywords be?  What about if my questions is; what are Ottawa’s famous landmarks?  

It is really important to remember that we never need to type a long question into Google.  All you need are keywords!  Keywords help us to find the best possible sites on our topic.

What search engines can we use if we want really kid-friendly information?

https://www.kiddle.co/  – Is by far the best one in my humble opinion.

Now your project involves making a short newscast about your city.  Let’s take a minute to look at some great examples of kid-friendly news videos.

Elements of a news report…

• Welcome everyone and introduce yourself.
• Make sure your story contains The 5 Ws!  
• Fill your newscast with important and interesting information.  Example, lots of key facts, interesting facts.
• You can use video clips and photos as props to help your newscast be more visually interesting.
• Present your ‘story’ with lots of energy and enthusiasm.
• You can include commentary and interviews with others in your presentation.  For example, if someone has visited your city, you could include an interview with them where you find out what their favourite tourist destination in that city was, their restaurant recommendations, etc…
• Kid-friendly news sites;

https://www.cbc.ca/kidsnews/

https://www.dogonews.com/

https://teachingkidsnews.com/

The Sad Little Fact – Being a Fact-Finder in the Age of Misinformation

 

A fake fact is otherwise known as MISINFORMATION…

Misinformation is ‘false or inaccurate information, especially that which is deliberately intended to deceive.’

Where do we hear this misinformation?  Unfortunately, the online world is absolutely full of it.  From youtube videos, to tiktok, Twitter, Facebook, and other social media, people are bombarded with fake facts and fake news.  Here is an example of misinformation that I found on youtube.

If you saw this video online you’d be terrified.  You might tell your friends about it and spread this information further.  So how do we verify if it is true or not?

Now it’s your turn to give this a try.  I need you to be a fact-checker and find out if this information is true or not using the techniques we just learned.

1. Check the source – run a Google Search on the publisher or author of the information and try to find out more
2. The Rule of Three – check three other sources of information
3. Check a good fact-checking website like Snopes.

So here is the information I want you to check.  It was posted thousands of times on Facebook and Twitter by regular people so there is no author to check.  You will need to rely on method 2 and 3 here.