The New Literacies group terms this skill:  Locating Information Using Search Engines.  This is similar to helping students understand what type of resources they should look in to find certain types of information.  For example, use an almanac if you want to find the average rainfall in Tanzania. Try an encyclopedia to get an overview of a topic.  Search Engines make the search task so much easier to find information, while simultaneously, making it more difficult to find the exact information you want.

The new reading research skills that students need involves understanding how search engines report out search results.  Which sites have paid for their location on the page?  What does the url tell us about the type of site it is and whether the site creators are trying to sell something.  Taking these extra steps to preview and evaluate search results takes additional time just as previewing a textbook chapter takes extra time; however, it is time well spent for it may well save time in the long run.  The best way to teach this to students may be conducting mini-experiments by giving students a question to answer and seeing which approach results in the answer most quickly.  Unless students can see that taking a minute to look through search results to find the best possible sources will actually save them time, I doubt they will move from “click click .. click.”

“Identify important questions or problems.

Locate information using search engines.

Critically evaluate online resources for accuracy and reliability.

Synthesize information across texts.

Communicate information using email, blogs, instant messages, wikis, Nings, social networking sites, and other media.”

This presentation started a quest to understand this topic and learn how and what to teach today’s digital consumers.  The New Literacies Research Team at UConn provides a great starting point.  It provides resources and links to understand the ways in which our more traditional reading instruction needs to change to teach the skills our students need for survival in this digital age.

In the meantime, I would love to have interested adults try this site and share your thoughts.  Signing up is free as are some of the books.  I know I will be starting with a free book.  Try it out.  Please let me know about your experiences.

An author chooses great descriptive words and powerful verbs to help her writing “come alive” and help the reader visualize what s/he is reading about.  Often students have difficulty evaluating their own writing.  It is difficult to see their own writing as another reader will view it.  Wordle comes to the rescue!  In creating a “word cloud,” students quickly spot overused words and “dull” words.  Moreover, students enjoy seeing their writing in a Wordle and do not gripe about this phase of the editing process.

See the full PicLit at PicLits.com

Students’ Perspective Wordle 

I also developed a wordle stating what I wanted students to remember.  It was interesting to compare and contrast the two wordles.

Teacher Perspective 7th Grade Reading

I was somewhat disappointed that the students did not list more of the reading strategies that formed the bulk of instruction.  And yet, they certainly remembered the contexts in which these strategies were embedded.  They remembered watching the movie Akeelah and the Bee as the culmination of our study of Greek and Latin root words.  They remembered learning camera “shots” and The Door Scene when we were working on the power of visualization.  The wordles also helped me see room for improvement.  I want students to remember the strategies we learn.  The activities should just be the “touch stone” or memory point for retrieving the strategy and how to use it.  Using the word clouds proved to be a quick and easy to summarize and assess a year’s worth of work.  Next year I will try to do better.

In manufacturing, the “just in time” philosophy means that the materials needed for the production process arrive exactly when they are needed.  The same philosophy applies to presenting ideas to teachers for how technology and web 2.0 resources can be used.  I often post a url to a site I have found helpful to me.  When I hear back from teachers it is often to mention how they were just thinking about a new way to do something when they received my e-mail.  This happened most recently with the newspaper generator (http://www.fodey.com/generators/newspaper/snippet.asp).  I shared an “article” I had my students generate, and I received a reply e-mail from a teacher saying how perfect it was for helping her students connect the answer to who, what, where, when, and why questions in a coherent article.  The students loved the idea of their own newspaper article that looked like the real thing.

The fact that this idea arrived in her e-mail mailbox just in time for her classroom focus made all the difference.

Using technology must be easy.  Every glitch means lost instructional time, frustration, disruptive or bored students, and a hesitancy to try again.  While not all problems can be anticipated or easily fixed, knowing that the technology specialist knows about our frustrations and helps to resolve them goes a long way to encourage most teachers to try again.