This resources curated below are to support teachers to locate resources to teach students about THE RESEARCHING PROCESS and some of the resources that we have at St Andrews in the Junior School.
The resources provided for teachers and students include:
the research process
researching tools
referencing and academic honesty
and links to the units of inquiry
curated materials specific to the units of inquiry
use of the library management system (Oliver) to support reading through the creation of reading lists and materials
Enclosed in the Blendspace below is an excellent tutorial that guides the listener in good practice and ways to improve and be more effective and efficient.
The skill of note taking is one that can be developed with practice.
The Blendspace below has interactive tutorials, suggested guidelines and images of how notes can be set out.
Yr 4 has been using SYMBALOO to easily share their resources with the students. This is another example of a bookmarking tool.
GENERAL SEARCH ENGINES
GOOGLE
An awareness that Google is not the only search engine is important. Each search engine has a different purpose (such as wikipedia). Later in this post are some examples of search engines for younger children.
WIKIPEDIA and its usefulness
Wikipedia can a starting place to get an general understanding of a new topic or concept. It is now improved in its quality control (as content needs to be substantiated) and often can be the most current source of information on a topic. Weblinks and references to supporting information can assist students to explore more deeply about a topic. It is a springboard tool in my opinion.
Like all sources ACCURACY of content needs to be assessed and this is a skill that students need to develop.
Some teachers are still concerned about using wikipedia, but it should be viewed and assessed like any information source for:
CURRENCY
RELEVANCY
ACCURACY
BIAS
One way to do this is using RADCAB – an acronym for Relevancy, Detail, Currency and Bias. This is an excellent online tutorial for students designed to teach them about these key aspects.
Understanding how to research and locate relevant information is a life skill. Students need to understand how different search engines work in order to be successful and efficient in their searching.
When searching students (at the very least) need to understand the following
– Key words and designing a search query
– Identifying what they need to find!
– Relevance to inquiry
– Ability to scan and re-assess the research process.
OTHER TIPS & TRICKS
Using simple ‘tricks’such as usingCONTROL F – to find a key word in a webpage or a lengthy PDF saves time and can be helpful to analyse the usefulness of a resource to the current inquiry.
Designing a search query is also where some students struggle. This tutorial explains how to do this.
Additionally, the following video looks at the importance of key word order when searching in Google.
Recently I presented about some ways to incorporate Visual Literacy with an iPad at the recent Apps Galore joint Mini-Conference (BCE and Lutheran Education).
“A content curation tool, in simple English, lets you easily pull videos, images, presentations, tweets, blog posts and other web content into a collection which you can then embed, publish or share online. I have been testing a few online curation tools and here’s a quick review of them all to help you pick the right one for your needs.” Blog post by Amit Agarwal (Digital Inspiration)
Joyce Valenza also discusses the place of curation tools in researching.She called curation “the new search tool“.
AND check out this LIVEBINDER by Carolyn Jo Starkey.
This concept seems like a great way to share easily from many places.
I use a variety of tools but this seems like the way to go. Anything that makes researching and collaboration simpler is a good idea.
