“There is so much information available to us today that it is important to have knowledge of available resources and to have flexible strategies for finding answers to compelling questions” (Eagleton, & Dobler, 2007, p.118). When I was in school and completed research for a project, our job was to go to the library to check out books, or look in the encyclopedia for information. The Internet was only just becoming a prominent search tool. Now, the Internet is a place with more information than anyone person could handle. So when we ask our students to begin researching their topic, they are met with an overwhelming amount of resources. Some of these resources are more reliable than others. The question is, how do we teach our students to surf this vast place and find information that they can validate. “Understanding validation as well as effective search techniques will help you both lessen the number of dubious sites that you might find and evaluate the ones that remain” (November, 2008, p.61).
For my inquiry-based project, students will be researching famous people in our social studies and science curriculum to determine how what they invented, discovered, or established changed our world. Even though using a search engine is “the second most popular Internet task next to e-mail,” my students will begin first with using search techniques in our research center. This research center has subscription resources that the students can utilize to be sure that they are searching through relevant resources. Some of these research tools are Nettrekker, BadgerLink (offering Britannica School), and World Book Online.
As I created my list of possible people students’ research, I discovered that not all of the resources above provided information. There were a few who tie back directly to our community of Janesville and therefor have little to no information available on these sites. The next step will then be the utilization of a search engine. More and more we are discovering the use of kid friendly search engines. I do provide these as clickable links on our research center page, but often the teachers do not direct students here, they just let them “google” it. The problem with this is that Google does not always put the most relevant sites first. “What this means is that the results of your search do not necessarily have anything to do with the quality of the information. A site at the top might be there based on how many links are coming into it from other sites. Popularity does not always equal the best quality” (November, 2008, p.22).
There are a few strategies that can be followed in order to be sure you are receiving more relevant information to evaluate. The first strategy that I used is the “topic + focus” strategy. “Students who use this approach are able to locate target information more quickly because they’ve identified a specific focus area within a research topic” (Eagleton, & Dobler, 2007, p.134). The person I chose to use in my example search was Clara Barton. Clara Barton played a role in our history but the name is not well-known. To begin with I chose my topic and focus to enter into the Google search engine. This was Clara Barton and life. I also chose to add an extension. “An extension of the topic + focus method is to use more than two discrete terms when searching, which we call ‘multiple keywords’” (Eagleton, & Dobler, 2007, p.134). I added the keyword of historical.
As I look through the list, I see the first result is from the Red Cross. This I think would be a fantastic resource as Clara Barton was the founder of the Red Cross. In order to share their history, they need to have accurate facts about her. The site itself breaks up the information into different topics and/or parts of her life. The next site I chose was from civilwar.org. I chose to look at this one because it is from the Civil War Trust and the URL indicated it was within their education section.
Next, I chose to pass by a few resources from biography.com and historynet.com. I chose to pass these by because biography.com is covered in advertisements making it very distracting and historynet is a .com site that I know nothing about. I would need to find out who creates this site and its content.
The last site I chose was from the National Historic site. This one really drew my attention since it had an extension of .gov. This would be a reputable site because “only government agencies can purchase and use .gov in their domain names. This particular extension is closed to the general public” (November, 2008, p.63). I opened this site to look closer and found that it gave exactly what I was looking for in an overall look at Clara Barton’s life. This site was actually located towards the bottom of the first page. One of the key things that Alan November shares is “how often people click on the sites that appear at the top of the list results” (November, 2008, p.21). If I had not chose to scroll and continue reviewing and evaluating the results, I would have missed this valuable resource.
References
Eagleton, M. B., & Dobler, E. (2007). Reading the web: Strategies for Internet inquiry. New York, NY: The Guilford Press.
November, A. C. (2008). Web literacy for educators. Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin Press.
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