When I consider the resources I use in my school library for teaching purposes, at the forefront of my mind is the usefullness and accessibility of the resource to my students. In my current TL role, I am teaching students from K-6. The main aim of my program has been information literacy that supports other KLA’s such as history and geography. My focus then has been teaching the beginnings of researching and resource analysis from years 3 and up. As such, when I plan to share a resource, in particular a digital resource, I critically analyse the resource to determine its usefullness and applicability to the task at hand. But what about students? How do they analyse resources with a level of understanding that is needed to assess resources? Using CRAAP as an analytical tool, has been helpful but it seems to have its drawbacks.

Teaching CRAAP has had mixed results. Students get stuck using the analysis well and often forget to use this tool the following year in subsequent research activities. It has made me question, is my teaching lacking clarity? is it a lack of retention on the students behalf? or is it simply that the tool is too complex for their level of understanding to apply successfully? More than likely it is a combination of all. And I am willing to embrace different modes of analysis to improve my teaching and student learning.

Too often fantastic books are left on the shelves in the library, in favour of easily accessible online resources. After all, give a child a laptop or an ipad and away they go, right? Wrong. Students need to be given the tactile opportunity to explore texts, especially non-fiction texts. My observation of my students shows me that unless they are strongly encouraged to use and understand the layout of non-fictional texts, navigating a website or digital resource well,  will be challenging, regardless of their age. Using CRAAP has made my students more aware of the currency, reliability, accuracy and authority of resources, rather than a resource for the sake of giving/ providing information. However, there are still challenges with teaching the concept of bias when we look at the P element being Purpose.

Kay Oddone’s video on CRAAP versus SIFT shows a great example of how a website can pass the CRAAP test fairly well, but have the reliability of information challenged in another resource, such as a video. As a TL, it has made me question whether teaching critical analysis of resources can be better performed by encouraging the use of SIFT. I really like the idea of students stopping before clicking on any hyperlinks on any web source, to really think critically about the resource. Perhaps this is the tool missing from my teaching program. By implementing a tool such as SIFT, I hope that the idea of bias will be better understood and critically applied and evaluated in student learning.