The second on-campus workshop offered last week was Search and Research Strategies. Using the Big6 as a framework, our teachers explored how to teach information literacy within the context of the curriculum:

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Although there are myriad information resources available, Google, Wikipedia and copy/paste are frequently the starting and ending points of the research process. Consequently, we need to (1) teach website evaluation, (2) expand our collective search/research toolkit, and (3) emphasize and adhere to Copyright and Fair Use.

Sites like Texas Indians and Martin Luther King Jr: A True Historical Examination illustrate the need to help students become critical consumers of information. While an adult’s discerning eye will quickly discover their biased shortcomings, many students may simply accept the information presented at face value. Website evaluation guides such as those from Kathy Schrock can greatly assist in this endeavor and we need to utilize them across all disciplines and grade levels.

Our middle school library website contains numerous subscription databases that many students and teachers are not aware of, and tools like Quintura, Whonu and Creative Commons Search bring a different perspective to extracting information from the web. Students won’t learn to use the library unless we take them to the library, and pointing them to alternate search engines can help break their over-reliance on all things Google.

Although the intricacies of Copyright and Fair Use can be difficult to grasp, Hall Davidson’s Guidelines for Teachers greatly simplifies the task and is a must-read for anyone in education. Similarly, teaching students to properly cite sources (print or electronic) is a necessity and sites like Son of Citation Machine and Microsoft Word’s References tools can make the process manageable for students of all ages.

From Theory to Practice

Bringing a structured and unified approach to the research process is a formidable undertaking but one that we are eager to embrace. Those who attended this session are already rethinking how they approach information literacy in the classroom. As our curriculum evolves, so too will our students’ ability to conduct research. Google and Wikipedia will always be a part of their online experience, but at the very least they will know how to properly locate, evaluate, and utilize the abundance of information that is only a few keystrokes away.

Posted: 06|8|08 at 5:34 pm. Filed under: Professional Development.
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