Digital Citizenship/Secondary/Digital Literacy- Online research

Learn

For tips on using google effectively, use these posters and help sheets

Google also has a number of lesson plans specific to their product

Remember there are a number of other places to find excellent content that google will not find.  Compare the results from searching some of these sources with results from google.

• DigitalNZ for New Zealand content. Use the filters to narrow down your search.
• EPIC databases contain thousands of international and New Zealand magazines, newspapers, biographies, substantial reference works, and images.  EPIC lets you access up-to-date full text articles covering a huge range of subjects. Your school should have a password or contact epic@tki.org.nz to find out what it is.
  
• Compare google results to those from a search engine like Dogpile  where you find results from across other search engines, or Bing
• Search the school or public library catalogue – does it recommend websites? Are there any books that provide the kind of information you need? Does it contain links to other information sources?
  

Recall

Students do Google a Day Challenges and record results on Google Docs or similar cloud based notebook.

Think

• How do the programmes create the search algorithms?
• What makes a good search question?
  

Act

- Write a search algorithms in code
- Create a way to teach primary school students about getting the best search results.
- Design a “Google a Day Challenge” for primary schools.

Expand

Make sure you also visit the section on copyright and plagiarism to find links to help with teaching note-taking and referencing and the section on critical thinking with ideas for teaching students to think critically about the information they have found.

Contributors

Shaun

Esther Casey - National Library of New Zealand