Ethical Use of Information

ELAL Learning Outcomes (Knowledge) - Ethical use of information includes: asking permission to use, share, or store information; acknowledging the ownership of information used to inform writing (citing); and fair and accurate representation of individuals and information.

This lesson starts with a review of how to ask specific and focused questions in order to research a topic and how to search for and use multiple sources to understand a topic and answer these focused questions. Students will discuss ownership of information and the importance of citing the information they use, demonstrating respect for authorship.

Lesson:

Objective: Students learn about ownership of information and how to cite the information they use to show respect for the original author(s).

Media samples: For this lesson, media samples will include any information articles that students have used for their research.

Discussion and activities:

1) Students or teacher will have chosen a topic for research. 

2) Students will then compose the question(s) that they want to answer pertaining to the topic. 

3) The teacher may review at this point how to use search words and may limit student research to certain websites. Also reviewing Google Read and Write at this point will benefit students who need to use the audio feature in order to understand what they are viewing. Students are reminded to take notes from each source and then to compose in their own words what they have understood from their research.

4) Once the students have found sources that answer their questions, they can learn how to cite information, using quotation marks for direct quotes with the name of the author and the date in brackets, and including a reference at the end of their text. 

Key Questions: Why is it important to acknowledge that the information you are using belongs to someone else? Can we use the exact words of an author and how? What should we include in our citation? Our reference? For a website? For an article? What is the standard for these two types of citations? (teacher to show students what is required - use APA) Where do we list our references?

Followup: Students are encouraged to do several research projects throughout the year. They should look for the references lists of the articles that they are reading, to note the number of references used and how the references are completed. It is worth noting to students that there are several ways to cite and reference information - APA is only one format.