Students and Researching

I came across the following infographic from Education Database Online Blog about students using technology to research.



A lot of the points I agree with. Students in primary and intermediate schools all use Google and Wikipedia for researching. Most of the researching I see is of a poor standard

• students ask questions in the search engine
• students don't know what key words are
• a lot of what is found is regurgitated in a PowerPoint or a Keynote with words students obviously don't know the meaning of
• it is all lower end thinking, there is no new knowledge or meaning

What I don't agree with is that Technology is making it harder for students to research. In my travels my observations are is that teachers do not teach research skills, they assume that students know how to research. Researching is considered Googling! The statement that the amount of information is overwhelming is due to the poor research skills that turns up millions of results. Another statement that it is harder for students to find credible sources is also down to teaching students how to recognise from URLs what looks like credible sites, and then searching the page itself to see if it is a reputable site.
Is the internet distracting? Are devices and their apps distracting? Yes they are! So now we have to teach self control to students, and reinforce on task behaviour.
I disagree with 'technology is damaging students' attention spans'... if anything it is improving it. In the last two weeks I have been in six different schools. My observations were of engaged, interested students who were learning. All of the schools were using devices to differing levels, all have had to discuss with students about appropriate use of devices and apps. Several teachers have told me that in particular several of their boys who were not doing well in traditional classrooms have been turned around with using devices.
I believe that technology is making it easier to research if you have the skills. Devices and apps like Evernote that allow you to store, cite and organise information needs to be taught to teachers and students alike. Google runs a free online PowerSearching Course which all teachers should do.

Let's teach the basic research skills! The following links are to a Higher Order Thinking Resource wiki that I am developing, that makes use of Graphic Organisers to scaffold student learning

• Writing good questions or another one that I use for writing Non-Googleable Questions
• finding Keywords
• using Ctrl F and a keyword on a page
• storing information with citation in Evernote or Notability
• rephrasing, rewriting information in own words

Student Digital Toolkit

It is becoming more apparent as teachers and students get more familiar with the online  digital tools and devices that there needs to be some management of these. Some teachers still get tied up with the old adage that all the students in the class has to 'produce a product at the end using this tool'.
It doesn't have to be so...I encourage teachers to have a 'Teacher Digital Toolkit'
This is an example of a basic one

For more teacher tools go to this website.

Students need a Digital Toolkit as well. I am working on 2 different websites at the moment, one is called
 Publishing Ideas

• ways to publish using online and offline tools
• variety of ways to publish i.e cartoons and comics

and the other is called Web 2 tools and Widgets

• tools and widgets that will enhance your blog or wiki
• photo presentation tools

Set up a student toolkit so that students know what is available and what they can use. In consultation with you, you both can decide what is the best tool for their learning.
The  following could be an example of a Student Digital Toolkit

Researching smarter

There are still a lot of teachers that are sending children off to do 'research' on Google using one key word.i.e bird (253 million hits later). When they finally find a page that has the information they want, it is invariably printed out, and trawled through looking for information.

This is long, tedious, boring and usually irrelevant!

Become a smart researcher with some of these strategies

1. have at least 3 key words if you are looking for information on birds, what sort of birds are you looking for, what country etc so now the Google search becomes 'bird native wading' and because we want to search for New Zealand Birds we click on  pages from New Zealand.
Now we have 10,400 hits!

2. Open up a mindmap/Graphic Organiser (I like to use Kidspiration or Inspiration, or you can use online versions) Create a simple mindmap






3. Go back to the internet site you have chosen, press Ctrl F (Command F for Macs) type in one of the key words from questions in mindmap like 'eats'

4. The word eat did not appear on my page so I used a synonym such as feed, click the next button to see each instance of the word feed until you see a sentence that will answer your question
5. Go back to your mindmap and type in the information you found
6. Go between the Internet site and the mindmap adding information
7. Add a picture to your mindmap by right clicking on a picture in your internet page, select Copy Image, go back to mindmap and paste (Ctrl V)
8. Don't forget to reference where information and picture came from

Model this way of researching to your class.
Use this model in all curriculum areas.
Become a smarter researcher yourself and your students will follow!

Transformations in the 21st Century Digital Environment

This is a slideshow I presented at a recent ICT Cluster Conference. It is an overview of the eight days I spent in a Year 5/6 class.

Keynote Speech Presentation

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Walking the Talk Day Six

Another great day with some excellent students. Maths is an interesting challenge as the students are streamed throughout the school so you have students coming from year 4 to 6. This is a particularly good bunch, very articulate and clued up! So I have a large group of students moving into the classroom every morning. They understand the routines well (even when I change them at the last minute). The whole idea of the maths organisation was for the students to be 'self managing', which they are but only with the things they really want to do, so I have had to inject a little more teacher direction. Now when they come in they have to do the 'Class Activity'. Once that is completed, students come up and use the mimio pen to write the answers, explaining as they go how they got that answer. The rest of the class has to agree with the answer, if not there is more discussion. Anybody who gets any of the answers wrong have to stay for the 'Workshop'. The students run the workshop that I have prepared.

Area Workshop

View more presentations from Jacqui Sharp.

I'm listening as I work with other students and jump in when I need to.

If I see that a child understands then I send them off to complete their other tasks.

In this example the child is using the 'Wii' to access games that have been saved to the 'Wii's' Favourites list.




There is the class Delicious page that their classroom teacher has set up and I have added to it. The students know that they can go into this to access the websites I think that have the appropriate games and quizzes for them.


Some of the students have started on their Google Sketch up and Lego Digital Design assessment tasks where they have to design a technological classroom annotated with measurements showing perimeter, area and volume.








More on Research Topic
I will post later on the research topic as there is so much to cover but here are some photos of students at the searching for information using keywords stage!
This group were thrilled as they found the answer to their question as to 'Why the Internet was invented?'
These two worked well together using the iPhone!
Some kids like to work on their own, this one is using the iTouch and listening to music at the same time!These two used the wireless internet feature on the Wii to find their information.

Walking the Talk Day Four

Day started off well with children completing their before school 'Morning Task', selecting News headlines, This day in History and weather. All 3 children reported back to the class using the mimio to screen clip and then the pens to highlight important points.

We had an interesting afternoon working on our research skills. I took the class through the following slideshow and we tried out some of the activities. Interestingly enough, they had never heard of Christopher Columbus but they were able to discern from the information provided on the 2 different websites which was the real information and which was false!

Internet Googling

View more presentations from Jacqui Sharp.

Walking the Talk Day One

Today was the first day of my 'Walk the talk'. I am teaching in a Year 5/6 class for 2 weeks (first 4 days of each week).
This is a Decile 10 school, with very capable children. It was a totally mac school until the recent purchase of some linux netbooks. The class of 28 children has 3 E-Macs and 1 teacher laptop. I have taken another iMac, a Windows computer and 4 Windows laptops and and a netbook. I was able to get them all onto the internet which is great as most of my planned programme is Internet based.
The most exciting thing for the students was the LCD TV and the Wii. They all thought they were going to be jumping around playing tennis and bowls, but that rumour was quickly dispelled as I showed them how it can access the internet wirelessly and I had some maths games bookmarked.
It was also noted that I had iPods, iTouch, and a PSP.
Once I set up the computers and the mimio, the children started filtering in, the first child was a bit of a character and very interested and capable with all things digital. He has become my main man and by the end of the day, he was teaching others how to use the mimio, access the internet sites on the Wii, save files to memory sticks and any other troubleshooting problems that arose. His job is to now train another person, and then it will snowball from there.
I showed the children my planning and told them how they could access it from my computer. My 'main man's' job is to get it set up in the morning from now. I set the routines of
1. Before School 3 different people per day have to click on the Morning Routines, one to look at the Weather, one to pick a news headline and one to find out what happened this day in History. I showed them how to Screen Clip the item they want to share to a new page in the mimio Notebook.
We needed to discuss how you need to read what you are going to screen clip so that you understand it enough to read and talk about with the class.Will be interesting tomorrow to see how the kids cope with it.
2. I showed them their spelling words which will be on the screen for them tomorrow, and set the routine of Bells ring - come in - start Handwriting card - move on to Spelling activity (on screen) - practice Keyboarding which will be on the Wii. More about this tomorrow!

This school streams their maths classes, so I lost most of the kids to other classrooms and had to train up a new lot. These are very able top stream students and seemed quite taken aback when I told them they were going to be teaching themselves, managing their own learning and booking me when they needed help! I gave them a pretest I had created on perimeter, area and volume. We then marked it and they had to write down on their Student Assessment Tracking sheet what areas of the test they needed to work on more. I showed them all the activities that were going to available in books, worksheets, computers, internet, Wii, PSP and iPod Touch. Tomorrow is when they have to come in, choose their activity or learning opportunities. I have told them I will be running a Perimeter Workshop which is their choice to attend...shall be interesting! More tomorrow!

The Literacy part of the day was Explanation Writing where we looked at the PowerPoint.

How to write Excellent Explanations

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This will be broken up and different parts concentrated on over the next few days. Children were very excited about the drafting and publishing possibilities. More about that later!

Ran out of time quickly for reading but was mostly about what the routines will be, and that students could choose from a wide range of Reading Options when they were not doing Guided Reading with me or related reading activity. More on this later.

The afternoon session was introducing them to the Class Wiki and especially the Wiki Promise



We made a start on our Research Unit. The children have been looking at Communication so I wanted to see what they had learned previously so they worked on an Inspiration diagram 'Fact Recall'. Tomorrow we are going to look at how to create a research question and find keywords.

Visit www.moblyng.com to make your own!

Helping children to become better researchers

To teach children how to become competent researchers requires several stages. I like to use Inspiration (or Kidspiration) Graphic Organisers to guide them in this task. Once they have some knowledge of the topic at hand teachers generally set them an activity where they have to come up with a question to research about. Most children find this difficult.

That is why I use this Graphic Organiser 'What do we know about?' Students fill in what they know about the topic. I then ask them to choose one of the ideas that they would like to know more about. They then choose one of the ideas and turn that into a question.




The nouns or verbs in the question are likely to be their search words.


The next step is to go to Google or any other search engine http://delicious.com/sharpjacqui/searchengines enter in the search words. Click on a website. Generally most of the websites they will choose will have a lot of text which can be quite daunting to read. This is when I introduce my trick of Ctrl F (Command - F for Macs). This brings up the 'Find' box,
type in one of the key words, if that word is on the page it will be highlighted, ask the child to read the sentence the word is highlighted in, refer them back to their research question and ask them if it answers their question, if not they click on the Next and that will highlight the next instance of that word, again they read that sentence. "Does it answer the research question?" If so the children highlight just that sentence, copy and paste into a Word document. They continue in this way until they have enough information that answers their research question.

The next Graphic Organiser is the 'Finding Information on the Internet'.
Children type in

• What the Question is
• What the keywords are
• the search engine they are going to use
  
• the criteria for the websites they will use
• the links to the websites

Under the Recording they can hyperlink the picture of the Word icon/symbol to the file they have created with all the copied material from websites. Under New Information is the link to the PowerPoint (or Keynote, or Photo Story, or MovieMaker or iMovie file) that contains the presentation they have made using the information they have found. Finally under Evaluation they type in their final thoughts about their research. This is great model for teachers and students alike. The teacher has a full assessment of the progress and procedures the child went through for their research. They can see what the question was, the key words used, the Internet sites used and then they can compare the 'Word' file with the final presentation to see if the child was able to make sense of the information they found and turn it into their own. Students are showing accountability for their learning by referencing the sites they have visited and demonstrating how they have turned their new knowledge into new information.
For this to work well and for students to become independent researchers this format needs to be repeated often. It can work well for novel studies, topic research, and as a starting point for several writing genres such as procedural, argument and explanation.