Foster Media Evaluation

Coaches should help coachees practise critical thinking when considering information sources.

Modern curriculums, such as the Pre-Senior Baccalaureate (PSB) require pupils to complete projects. Project learning often means that pupils will have had some choice in the title or topic of their project, and will have a taught element of the course, which requires instruction on referencing, plagiarism, critical thinking and research. Forward thinking curriculums such as the PSB are aligned with preparing pupils for the future and relevant use of edtech, and there are lots of tools to support curriculums such as these.

Search coach is an excellent tool to help young learners. Bing is another option, as it provides information on the number of citations on a source. However there may be degrees of trust in different informational sources. It is always useful to inform pupils and adults alike about AI and its 'hallucinations' and how it sometimes fills the gap with misinformation.

When completing projects, the use of A.I., including ChatGPT or Copilot, can be seen as a threat, However, some forward thinking institutions have incorporated its responsible use, and have used these platforms to ask students to question and prove whether a ‘fact’ is incorrect  ChatGPT and Copilot have the ability to generate information and images that can be misleading, and staff and pupils need to apply critical thinking skills.

Coaches can help both educators and pupils by evidencing sources where critical thinking needs to be applied.

My favourite tech to support this is:

Search Coach and how it analyses how ad where pupils have searched online

ISTE explains that ‘coaches should support educators and students in critically examining online media sources and the ability to recognise the perspective of an author and purpose or bias of information sources.’ 

BBC iReporter- unfortunately this no longer exists but hopefully it was so good it will be brought back