December: Location & Access Strategies

[Janet Murray]

Ask questions and post your ideas about teaching location and access skills by replying to this message. How will you persuade students to
seek information from sources other than the World Wide Web? ("Don't just Google it.")

How will you help students improve their "search" skills on the World Wide Web?

How will you assess their performance? How will you report their achievement?

[Nan Sirju- Rampersad]

 Hi,

Bearing in mind that I deal with kids from form 1 to Form 6U (11+ - 18+) there are a wide range of strategies that I use to encourage the use of books, journals and proprietary databases.

With the younger ones I focus on evaluating resources and I stress the fact that items on their reading lists have already been assessed. The sites that are suggested by the subject teacher have already been perused and been given the 'thumbs up' so they can safely use those. The suggested reading (books, magazines,newspaper articles- especially for local content, can be used freely without having to asses reliability, appropriateness, relevance etc. When we discuss Wikipedia I stress authoritativeness of contributor and encourage the use of multiple searches and comparing the information gathered.

The older ones are told basically the same thing with the added encouragement about using a variety of source types providing that they are credible, appropriate etc. One of the geography teachers at my school is a heavy user of National Geographic magazines (hard copy) and her zeal has rubbed off on her students and elevated their perception of the usability of this type of information source.

Improving search skills on WWW.
This is done by search term discussions and the use of live examples to show the range of results you would get.They are taught and encouraged to use search refining techniques such as source selection - eg. books and magazines but not videos and newspapers, as well as other parameter setting facilities- year, media type etc.

Assessment is in a summative manner for the younger ones, done with a specific subject project. For the older ones, I may get feedback, and if not, I hope for the best. My school has a relatively small senior population and they use the library heavily, because I am in contact with them in a non-classroom setting I do quite a lot of teaching as teachable moments arise, informally and one-to-one oftimes.

Reporting is done on the report card for the younger ones.

[Janet Murray]

Thanks for sharing your ideas, Nan.

[Colet]

Hi Nan,

I'm curious about what type of marks are included on the report card for younger students.  Is this a traditional letter grade or does your school use proficiency levels/mastery?