 Hi my name is Ann Oro. For the next 20 minutes we'll be working on how to build the knowledge of searching the Internet with your students. Over the years I have observed students looking for information on the Internet. It was clear that the students believed that the Internet would magically give them the right answer, but when they arrived at a web page it just looked like a sea of words. I've realized that I needed to build a scaffold for my students from the earliest ages and by the time they were 14 years old in the 8th grade they would be confident searchers with a wide variety of tools to complete the task at hand. My goal is to help you think about the stepping stones you need to provide your students to cross the river of information that they will find. These skills can be adapted to NEH student and break down into five categories. Reading web pages. Giving credit to your sources. Building a search query. Evaluating the information. And creating their own information on the Internet. This video is intended to get you thinking about how you need to build the scaffold for your students. You can learn more by following the links on my wiki page. My youngest students in kindergarten begin building their skills by learning to make selections on a web page. The websites I will speak about are sites I found useful over the years. I did not have a connection to any of these websites except as a user. I most recently began using abcmouse.com. By going to the link on the screen you may be able to sign up for a free account. My goal is to build the students understanding of moving between links and their motor skills of moving and clicking the mouse. If your students need extra practice learning to click the left side of the mouse spread.com has a useful and free mousing around activity. First and second grade students are beginning to read and become better readers as time goes on. I introduced the students to Enchanted Learning's Little Explorers Picture Dictionary. They really feel like big kids when they work on the task. You can download this handout on my wiki. We go on a hunt for fruit in the first grade. I list clues. We practice the first one together. We select the correct letter of the alphabet. The first fruit's name begins with an A. We look for pictures of fruit on the A page. When they find the picture they compare the words on my handout with the words on the internet. If they think they found a match they print the word on the handout. I expect the students to copy the word exactly. Transferring information from the screen to the handout helps them build an eye to being accurate as they get older. The second graders begin with a review of finding birds on Little Explorers Picture Dictionary. We quickly move on to following links to find more information. They practice moving from a link to read a new page to clicking the back button to return to the main dictionary. One key to using the internet is becoming aware of distracting ads and information on internet pages. The second and third grade students have to research information about our country. In the United States I use both Enchanted Learning, the same site that contains the Picture Dictionary, and FactMonster. Enchanted Learning is ad-free. FactMonster contains ads on the right side of the screen. Common Sense Media has a rich set of lessons on topics for grades K through 12. The Common Sense Media Things for Sale lesson can help you introduce the concept. In 2009 I read a blog post by Brian Crosby. He was introducing the idea of following a pattern to write a story using the important book by Margaret Wise-Brown. I modified the idea to help my students create a presentation about animals. Through the presentation I have my students start to learn about citing their sources. I teach my students to create presentations that rely on images rather than text. Fourth grade students tend to like animals. I have the students combine facts they know for sure about an animal with images for a short presentation. Picture Learning is a site with images that are free to use in any school project and each image has a citation that can be copied and pasted. In the fourth grade as we approach the idea of citing your source we continue on to print media through a short exploration of the school's set of children's encyclopedias. I ask the students to choose an encyclopedia at random. Next they look through the book to find information about one country. They type 10 interesting facts contained in the article. The students enjoy the ability to choose a country and find facts of interest. Typing the facts gives them exposure to another form of material that can be included in school work. I take the students to the Citation Machine website. We follow the link to the MLA Encyclopedia. We look at the encyclopedia and determine if there is an author's name for the article, the title of the article, the title of the work, which is the title on the cover of the encyclopedia. We look at the inside page of the encyclopedia to locate the publishing company, publishing city, year published in volume number. Once the citation is created, we copy and paste it into the word process document. The students leave their fourth grade year with the confidence to find images for school work, read web pages, find information in print, and cite their sources. Students did not always get the assistance they needed at home to accurately search for information on the internet. In the fifth grade, our students complete two short papers about historical persons. We begin the research where we left off in the fourth grade by using print encyclopedias. It assists the students in focusing on the facts the teacher is requesting. When they have exhausted the encyclopedia, we move on to searching the internet. We start online queries with sweet search for me. The sweet search for me site says it searches only websites that their staff of research experts, librarians, and teachers have evaluated and approved as high quality content appropriate for young users. Google helps fill in the gaps. It's probably a site they will be directed to use at home as well. When we begin talking about searching the internet for information, I tell them to imagine that every page was ripped out of every book in the library. Then all of those pages were mixed up and thrown in a pile. If they were to look for the place where George Washington Carver was born, they would have to pick up each page and see if the words George Washington Carver were on the page and a synonym for the word born or birth. This leads us to the idea of search terms. If you are not personally confident about searching the internet, I would highly recommend taking the power searching with Google online class. It's free. I also found great value in listening to a recording that Bob Sprankel has on his website. It is a recording of a workshop by Susan Adams from 2007 called If You Know Google. There are links to these websites on my wiki. Students and grownups alike have the habit of typing an entire question into the search box. While search engines are getting better at these types of queries, you may still not get the best results. I asked the students for suggestions on what to type to find out where George Washington Carver was born. Often students will tell me that they would type where was George Washington Carver born. We look at that phrase as a search. One feature of sweet search for me is that every term that is typed gets highlighted in a different color. The important idea that I share with my students is that you can let a search engine know that you want certain words to be found next to one another on the page by using quotation marks. The query quotation mark George Washington Carver quotation mark space born will look for the words George Washington Carver right next to each other and the word born somewhere on the page. It's easy to see in sweet search that George Washington Carver is now all in the same highlighting color and born is in a separate color. During the process, the students learn to create a bookmark folder in Firefox to save every website so that we can go back and create citations. The process takes several 42-minute class periods as the students build search queries and identify the information needed for their report. Along the way, I introduce the edit find command to find a word within the page. If the search query included the word born, you can use edit find to quickly jump to that word on the webpage. The students leave fifth grade with two papers they researched and wrote themselves. As the computer teacher, I assist the students with the technical details of finding information and citing their sources. Their classroom teacher helps them with their sentence structure and paragraph transitions. The fourth category of becoming a literate searcher on the internet is understanding how to evaluate the source. I found a very good website evaluation web quest by Joyce Valenza that I have used and modified with my students. Being able to bookmark websites within a browser is an important skill. In the sixth grade, we take it a step further and begin to use the social bookmarking site Digo to save and share bookmarks. The advantages are that the students can access their bookmarks on any computer. They can share bookmarks to groups and they can annotate and add descriptions to the bookmarks. As a teacher, you can create a Digo account, complete a free educator application and once you've been approved, you can create student accounts and group them into classes. From year to year, I choose a different topic question that I present to my students. It might revolve around a big sporting event or an award ceremony. For example, last year I asked when was the first Academy Awards ceremony and who had the idea for the awards. As a teacher, I can conveniently see all the bookmarks in Digo. The students are able to share comments as they bookmark the site. I choose 12 different student selected sites. If necessary, I bookmark a few extra. The sites are sometimes excellent sources, sometimes the choices are questionable. Rather than sharing my opinion of the bookmarks, I place the students in one of four groups. The even numbered groups look at sites A through F. The odd numbered groups look at sites G through L. I place the sites on a symbol page that are labeled and color coded for easy selection. I review key questions for each specialist as a group so that they understand how to fill in the chart. As listed on Joyce Valenz's web quest, the content specialists are focusing on if the site covers the topic comprehensively and accurately, and what do those words mean? Can they understand what's being said? Is it written above or below their level of understanding? What's unique about the site? Are the links well chosen, sufficient? And what is a link and what does sufficient mean? They look to see if they can tell the date the information was created or revised and where they might find that information. Also, would they get better information from a book or an encyclopedia? The biased specialist is trying to decide why the site was created. Is it to perform, to sell, to explain, is it a parody? Is it personal or a commercial website, something the government or another organization made? Is there only one side of an argument being presented? Is it fact or opinion? The usability specialist is trying to decide if the site's easy to navigate, if the content's well-labeled. Is it easier to get around between the pages in the website? Does everything look like it's spelled correctly using good grammar? Is it a clear, uncluttered webpage, or is it just filled with advertising? The most difficult job is the authority specialist. The explanation takes the longest as we look into the components of a website address. We look at the first part of the website address, which includes the top-level domain. In this case, it's .edu. I ask what the students know and then elaborate on the common top-level domains for the United States, including .com, which are a commercial site that anyone can register, .edu, which are higher education sites, .gov, which are government-sponsored sites, .org, which any organization can register. And then we look at country code extensions, such as .uk for the United Kingdom, .ca for Canada, and .au for Australia. We look at how to delete portions of the website address to try to decide more about where does this information come from and does where this information resides on the internet make it a more reliable source or a less reliable source. As the student truncates or deletes part of the website address, they learn that if they ever get an error message, they can simply continue deleting portions of the website address until they get to the main website and learn who is the person who designed and developed this information. The students also learn that if they notice a tilde in the website address, even if it's a respected higher education institution, the tilde sometimes denotes a personal webpage. So even if they believe they're on a credible source, they still have to think about who's the author. Once the students have completed their research and ranked the sites from one being the best to six being the weakest, they must decide as a group with all of the specialist questions in mind, which was the best of the six websites they reviewed and which was the weakest. Group one and three come to the front of the room and share their findings. Interesting discussions ensue as a whole class if one group finds out that their best site was chosen as the weakest by the other group. The seventh grade students submit a proposal to research a topic of personal interest. The topics vary widely from sports to hobbies and even Big Ben. They use Digo to bookmark their sites, Google Docs to gather their research notes, presentation software to build slides, and citation machine to document their sources. They have to let me know what they'd like to research, why they're interested in the topic, who else might be interested in what they learn, what they know about the topic before they start their research, and two specific things they want to find out. When they share this information, they wrap up by letting us know what are their questions this brought to their mind and in what ways this increased their knowledge. They come full circle by evaluating the sites they used in their research using the forms from the sixth grade. It helps them recognize which sites were the strongest sites used when they gathered the report facts. My students receive a complete understanding of the depth of the internet when we explore search databases. I explain that what we see in Google or Yahoo or Bing is just like an iceberg. When I ask what they know from science, they explain that just a small part of the iceberg is visible above the waterline. In New Jersey, we're very fortunate. If you have a public library card, you can access the EBSCO Search databases for free. Many schools in the United States pay for subscriptions for the university and high school students. As an example, we search for a scientific article on electric cars. I log on to EBSCO Host and demonstrate a search for electric car in the primary, middle school and academic databases. I am very careful to point out the need to choose articles that have the full text online. We compare the 92 results from magazines such as Boys' Quest and Boys' Life found in the primary search to the almost 1,400 results from magazines such as Time and U.S. News & World Report in middle school search to the amazing 4,750 results from academic journals and academic search premier. The students follow up my demonstration with a comparison of results from EBSCO and Google on a timely topic of interest. On my wiki is a handout the students used to research Margaret Thatcher on her 87th birthday. They reflected on the reasons they might choose to use a search database over Google. The overwhelming response was that they could quickly find more scholarly articles in a search database. In the 7th grade, I create Wikipedia accounts for the students. They use Wikipedia's own tutorial to learn to edit a wiki page, add links and include an explanation about the change. They do not actually edit the Wikipedia. They simply learn what it takes to edit in a personal sandbox page. I explain that just as children play in a real sandbox, the Wikipedia sandbox page gives people a chance to learn without actually affecting the Wikipedia. When the students return to complete their 8th grade year, they take turns working with me one on one to check links for our school's Wikipedia entry and we adjust them as necessary. This year, we are working on adding an information box about the school to the page. We modeled the box on a local school with a very complete Wikipedia entry. Finally, in 8th grade, they learn the basics of HTML. I explain that they may not want to use HTML to create a webpage personally, but that they may find a basic understanding of the commands and how they are used to be useful. They will find that in the future they may want to customize content on a website and those sites use HTML to make those customizations. 20 minutes is really a short amount of time to share everything that I'm doing from kindergarten to 8th grade, but I look forward to continuing our conversation both online and through my contact information. Please remember to make sure that you take a look at the Wikipedia.