Information Literacy
The key questions we will explore:
1. Where are your favorite search engines that you use to search for online information?
2. How do you sort through the information you receive?
3. How do you evaluate online resources?
4. How do you organize the information you find online?
5. Do you think it is important to teach our students to research online?
6. Do you think it is important to teach our students to evaluate online information?
A great site to use with our students that has an information literacy quiz on it is Alan November’s site. You can access Alan November’s site at: http://www.novemberlearning.com/Default.aspx?tabid=160. Don’t worry he has an answer key posted!
During this workshop we will complete the following tasks:
Task # 1
Lesson Ideas for teaching your students how to validate sites. Instructions in learning pairs have our students review the following websites. Each learning pair should read and summarize the websites below in a word document.
http://www.dhmo.org/
http://pubweb.northwestern.edu/~abutz/di/intro.html
http://www.martinlutherking.org/
Task # 2
Demonstrate to your students how to validate their websites.
1. Review how to read a URL address using Arthur Butz’s website.
2. Review the WayBack Machine using Martin Luther King’s Website.
3. Show them Alan November’s site that review these strategies for validating a URL address along with six other unique ways to validate a website. http://www.novemberlearning.com/
Task # 3
Students learn how to search on the Internet effectively.
They learn to use the Advanced Search techniques on the visble web using Google. Students will also learn to how to use the invisible web at www.completeplant.com. Furthermore studens will learn how to use metasearch engines such as dogpile.com and metacrawler.com.
Task # 4
Students create virtual index cards to organize their research.
Task # 5
Students employ graphic organizers to clarify thier information objective. Students use Inspiration and Writer’s Companion to brainstorm essential questions and other subsidiary questions. Jamie McKenzie defines subsidiary questions as “questions that help us build answers to our essential questions.” (http://www.fno.org/nov97/toolkit.html)
Students should begin their graphic organizers using cmap tools (http://cmap.ihmc.us/), Writer’s Companion or Inspiration.
