Information and digital literacy in education via the digital path

The power of Google search engine lies in its hidden features. Getting precise search results requires much more than simply comping up with a random search query and hitting  ‘I am feeling lucky’ button. Google search is a skill that needs to be explicitly taught to students.

Teaching students how to conduct smart search queries online is an important part of cultivating a digital citizenship culture within your classroom.  Smart searching goes beyond the simple ability to conduct quick search queries to how to effectively locate information online and assess their authenticity and accuracy. In other  words, smart searching encompasses a complex set of interrelated skills and competencies that together make up the holistic picture of what it is to be a search savvy netizen.

This is an excerpt from a book that I have been working on for the last fifteen months. I'm getting close to finishing it. 

Our students have become accustomed to entering a search into Google as soon as they are confronted by a question to which they don’t have an answer on the tips of their tongues. However, if they’re forced to take a few minutes before they search, they often find that they already know the answer. This is why a pre-search checklist should include listing what you already know about a topic. This list can be generated from memory or from notebooks (physical and digital). Not only does this process refresh students' memories, it also saves time in the long-run because they aren't spending time searching for information that they already have.

Improve your online research skills and your ability to critically analyse sources of information.

For those of you who haven't seen it yet, below is one of our popular infographics we published last year featuring important web tools and apps to help you in each of the 7 steps of the research process. As we have stated elsewhere, this is only 'a tentative sketch of what we think are the seven important steps of a research plan. For each of these stages we featured a short collection of web tools to help you carry it out. '  '

The key to unlocking the educational potential of the virtual world is through knowing how to effectively search it with the minimum time and efforts possible. Effective search in this sense refers to the ability to locate targeted information online using ‘informed search queries’. It does take time and practice to develop such an ability but it is worth every single second you spend learning it.

The CILIP Information Literacy Group (ILG) has published revised versions of its Research Smarter resource sheets "designed to help secondary school students research effectively and be information literate". There are 10 of them, each 1 or 2 sides of A4, "made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 licence, so they can be shared, reproduced and re-used widely". Topics include: Referencing your research; Why do I need to research my topic?; Research is a messy process; What search engines are out there?

You can get the sheets at https://infolit.org.uk/information-literacy-group/school-resource-sheets/