A group of teachers sat in Tahoma High School’s Career Center computer lab, looking at a Web site about a place called Dog Island.

On the front page of a site that looks professionally designed, it exhorts the wonders of Dog Island – where canines can roam free, hunting rabbits “free from the stress and hardship associated with daily life among humans.”

A little further reading would raise red flags among most adults, but an unsuspecting teenager may not realize the site is an elaborate hoax.

Bill Weis, a science teacher at the school, was teaching his colleagues about how students often fully believe what they see online without questioning it.

“It’s critical that you recognize that they’re taking things in differently than we did,” Weis said. “You need to recognize this lack of filters. Their brains process this very differently than ours. We have to teach very differently now.”

Weis showed a video of British students who had been pointed to a few hoax Web sites, similar to the Dog Island one, and asked them to offer some thoughts on them.

Students in the video said the sites seemed legitimate because they appeared to be well-designed and looked good, but they didn’t really delve into evaluating the content.

“A great place to start with your students is to show them that there is garbage out there,” Weis said. “Next is how do you detect it? They should be questioning everything they see on the Internet. Where does it fall in that spectrum, because it gets kind of fuzzy sometimes. The kids that do this are better off. The ones that struggle with this, I think, are going to be left behind.”

Use of technology in the classroom, Weis said, needs to be another tool in teaching kids to develop and use critical-thinking skills. Rather than teaching a topic like a World War II battle, for instance, he suggested using the topic so students would not only learn about the battle but be better thinkers at the same time.

“It’s our foothold in this country, our innovative, upper-level thinking,” he said. “These are the skills that are going to get our kids ahead.”

This seminar June 26 was part of a three-day conference organized by Kimberly Allison and Ethan Smith, former teachers in the Tahoma School District who are now instructional technology coaches with the goal to continue training teachers as the district integrates more technology.

Ian Jukes, an expert on technology in education, spoke to the district staff last summer, which gave Allison and Smith some foundation principles. Among them is the idea that there are digital natives and digital immigrants.

Weis explained that no one on the staff at any of the schools are digital natives, and that even students at the junior high level were digital immigrants.

A native is someone for whom technology has been a part of daily life since birth. Most of us are immigrants, trying to adapt to changing technology that is evolving faster all the time, requiring those who are responsible for kids to be keenly aware of the role technology plays in and out of the classroom.

Allison said she paired those concepts with other ideas she picked up at a conference in Atlanta, Ga. this year. In the spring, she thought of organizing and hosting a technology conference for Tahoma district teachers after school finished.

“What I like about this is that each of the sessions are a little bit longer than most conference sessions,” she said.

And at the end of each day, educators got together in the library at Tahoma High, played with what they had learned on computers and discussed what they had missed from other sessions.

“They really get the opportunity to work with each other,” Allison said. “They’re not bolting out the door at 4 p.m.”

Training is key, because in the two years or so since voters approved the district’s technology levy – a major victory for a district buying surplus computers from neighboring districts due to lack of funds — the district has been slowly integrating new tools into the classroom.

Allison said when computers first came into the classroom more than a decade ago, teachers didn’t get any training and it became a burden rather than a tool.

“We’re at a tipping point where technology is going to make our lives easier, and I think teachers are really starting to see it,” she said. “Part of my goal is to help teachers get to that place quickly like I did when I first started this job, to get comfortable with technology even though they’re not experts.”

Allison believes hands-on training like the teachers got at the conference is a big step.

“I would say it’s been really successful,” she said. “It’s far exceeded my expectations.”

Staff writer Kris Hill can be reached at (425) 432-1209 (extension 5054) and khill@reporternewspapers.com