Internet and Effective Internet Searching

1. Purpose: Be wary of websites that are cluttered with advertisements or might be trying to sell you something.

2. Background: When reading articles, try to look for the author’s name and when the article was written. Is it recent or outdated?

3. Teach: Integrate the teaching of these skills into everything you do. Model your searches explicitly and talk out loud as you look things up. Researching skills don’t need to be covered in stand alone lessons.

4. Justify: When you’re modelling your research, go to some weak websites and ask students to justify whether they think the site would be useful and reliable.

5. Path: Students might like to start their search with some sites they know or have used before rather than randomly googling.

6. Cite: Give students lots of practice of writing information in their own words, and show them how to use quotation marks and cite sources. Remind students about the seriousness of plagiarism and copyright infringement. These are terms even my grade two students used. It’s never to early to learn about web literacy.

7. What is the internet? The Internet is a huge collection of computers around the world. These computers are all linked together, and they can "talk" to each other, sharing information. If your computer is connected to the Internet, it can be connected to millions of other computers, in many different parts of the world.

8. Search: Start with some general key words. If your results aren’t what you want, alter the keywords to make a more specific search.

9. Delve: Look beyond the first few results. Flick through a few pages if need be. Let students know that many websites use Search Engine Optimisation to improve the visibility of their pages in search results. That doesn’t necessarily mean they’re the most useful or relevant sites.

10. Source: Look at the actual URL address to see where you’re going before you click on a search engine result. Use some intuition to decide whether it seems reliable. Is it from a well known site? An educational or government institution? Is it a forum or opinion site?

11. Validity: Ensure students understand that you cannot believe everything you read. Encourage them to make their own judgement by checking more than one source if they’re not sure.