The CART lesson

Following up on the newsletter article I posted last week, I thought I'd post about the lesson I taught today to introduce the acronym to the sixth graders.

I started by using a presentation made for my Smartboard (which I am probably not using to its fullest potential, but really is an awesome piece of technology.  It makes me feel like a football commentator.  And if anyone wants to buy me one of these, I say go for it), which introduced what the four letters in CART stand for (Current, Accessible, Relevant and Trustworthy).


After the original presentation, the students were broken up into groups of four, and then within the groups, into pairs.  Each group was given a totally non-Social Studies related topic.  Then, within the group one pair was assigned to use CART to find a "more useful" and a "less useful" online resource and the other group was to find a "more useful" and a "less useful" print resource .  At the end, the groups came back together to show the other pair what they found.  The idea was that they used CART to have proof to defend their choices.

The lesson went well, though in two out of the four classes we ran out of time before they got to the defending their choices part.  We'll see how it goes tomorrow.