Research and Information Fluency

With the NETS for students and the Common Core Standards becoming more prevalent and the new testing (PARCC) that will be in place by 2014, students will be asked more and more to research information, analyze and evaluate the information from a variety of sources and then report their results; however, do our kids really know how to research?  With most of the research being done online these days, our youth need to start to learn efficient ways to sift through all of the information as well as use safe search engines.

A few of my colleagues began teaching research skills to their 4th graders and used, what I think, is a great resource to introduce the process.  This screenshot was taken from the Kentucky Virtual Library
and is an interactive way to show students how to research (click image to visit the site).

Once they know the process then they can be modeled how to search online for resources.

Google is a wonderful search engine, especially if you take advantage of the advanced search tools.  However, I wanted to share a few other search engines that I compiled through research (Howie DeBlasi, CEO of Digital Journey gave me great resources).

sweetsearch.com  A staff of experts have compiled a list of thousands of credible websites (PBS, Library of Congress...) for students to search to on their site.  As of now this site is ad free, which is a bonus!  I could see this site being used for 4th/5th graders and up.  You can visit this blog site to read more about SweetSearch.

Searchy Pants is a great search engine that is safe for students and families.  It is simple to use and uses School Safe Search technology to deliver safe content to kids.  This site is great for K-5 students.

Boolify is a great site to teach the boolean linking words while searching.  It is a visual search engine that connects the students keywords using colored blocks with words like and or not.  It teaches the kids to find and use keywords to narrow down their search.  This could be used for multiple grades.
Here is a third grade class using Boolify (keep in mind the platform has changed a bit following the capturing of this video)

InstaGrok is a very cool resource that creates a concept map of your search.  Remember Google's Wonder Wheel, this is Wonder Wheel intensified.  See there demo video, which can also be found on their website.

One last video that might be worth while watching and/or showing to your class is one created by a group called Common Craft.  They create short explanatory videos for teachers or trainers to use.  You can subscribe to some of their videos on YouTube or you can pay for their whole video library on their website.

This video gives a short explanation on how to search efficiently on the Web.