As a secondary social studies teacher pushing my students towards higher order thinking and inquiry, I often find myself letting my students go off on an research. Technology allows my students instant access to millions of resources, but while information is readily available, it is not always reliable. An obstacle for teachers and students is that information retrieval is both safe and leads to accurate information. Information overload sounds like a silly obstacle, one that many years ago teachers would have envied. But the challenge is making sure students can decipher the information to find validity and credibility. How can teachers do this? Well it is important as the teacher to teach into skills such as fact checking and corroboration. To be 21st century consumer of information, social studies students must practice by comparing and contrasting sources, checking relevant citations and looking into peer reviewed articles. Our book suggests that using misleading sites as demonstration tools for teaching students can be an important part of digital literacy (Roblyer, 339).
Another challenge faced in the social studies content is information sharing done by students. An important part of the social studies classroom is creating and sharing information that helps teach or present a topic. With the advent of technology students can now share their information digitally. There information can be far reaching and have a large audience. The challenge is ensuring the safety of students when sharing their presentations and information, as well as, easing the nerves of parents who may not want their students work published. To help solve this problem, districts should create plans for teachers and parents to understand how students are being kept safe on the internet. In addition, students should be taught internet safety, such as not sharing full names and location, as well as, not responding to inappropriate comments or personal questions.
Roblyer, M. D. (2016). Integrating Educational Technology into Teaching, 7th Edition. [Bookshelf Online]. Retrieved from https://bookshelf.vitalsource.com/#/books/9780133955439/
Danielle Leone: EDTECH Learning Log. 
Interesting challenges. I have often wondered how much more time we have to spend to ensure that the information gleaned is accurate. While many of us start our research at Wikipedia, we are quick to discount it for accuracy due to its open editing abilities. I use the citations but then have to verify the citations. What I’ve found makes it more difficult is when someone has spent the time to create a bogus website to support the citation. Or, the citation leads to an unheard of source that can appear legitimate at first glance. How much time do we have to track those down?
I also found your second concern interesting. First, of course, we all want to protect our students while teaching them to be good digital citizens. Secondly, I can’t count the number of new accounts I’ve made signing up for various tools just for this class. When working outside of a protected learning community (eg. Moodle, Blackboard), I try to use an email account that doesn’t expose my personal details; however, that is onerous in that I have to remember the email username and password and add it to the the daily schedule of things to check.
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