How do you teach ethical use of digital information? Do you teach this at all?

I'd be very interested to hear how citation is taught at different grade levels. For example, universities may require APA style, but this seems too much to expect for students in grade school or even middle school. Does your school or district have a policy for what constitutes an acceptable citation? Do you relax the rules for students in lower grades? Do you have to use your own judgment? Where do you start?

Our students use Noodletools. For 6th grade we use the basic MLA style. Depending, the 7th and 8th graders use the advanced MLA style. It is taught when students come to the library media center to do research projects. BTW - the kids love to do Works Cited pages now!

Continuing on.......I use the MLA style manual if there is a question. I have created a Works Cited worksheet that exactly follows the Noodletools entry form data. When they get to Noodletools, they have all the information they need already filled out on the worksheet. The biggest learning curve for the middle school students has been understanding what a "sponsor" is. They think it is the advertiser at first. I equate sponsor to publisher and show them how to find out who it is. They get a lot of practice with this during science projects where they are getting a lot of practice evaluating science sites for accuracy, bias, and timeliness.

Terri, It sounds like you have a well developed and progressive program. Congrats on making this great effort.

Finding the sponsor or publisher of a website can be quite a challenge. Sometimes the information is right there on the page, other times you have to dig right down to the website registry information. (We sometimes use the Whois database to see who registered the domain name.)

Even though this is a gray area, it remains an important skill to teach. Thanks for doing the job in the very real world of middle school

~ Dennis@21CIF