Information Literacy Lessons

Today I piloted an information literacy lesson aimed at Year 7 & 8 classes.

The goal is to make them internet-savvy and more efficient researchers. Today's lesson was delivered to a Year 7 class and focused around effective Google searching.

This entire lesson plan was borrowed and adapted from Tiffany Whitehead's "Google it" Better documents.

I started off by asking the students to pretend that they were making a quiz on a popular book series. I chose The Mortal Instruments by Cassandra Clare as an example.

I asked them to imagine that one of their questions asked what kind of animal was the character Luke bitten by.

 

I then typed this exact question into Google and showed the class the results. The top three were about snake handlers that had been bitten by their pet cobras.

 

I then showed them a video by Matt Cutts, explaining exactly how a Google search works.

 

 

 

The students loved this video, and were fascinated by everything that happens in the half-second it takes for Google to retrieve your search.

 

 

After the video we returned to the original question. I asked the class how we could make it more efficient. There were several answers, all very good. In the end, we had narrowed down the question to this:

 

 

By eliminating the unnecessary words and focusing on "Luke," "bitten" and by adding "Mortal Instruments," we were able to get a series of accurate results and the answer we were looking for: A werewolf!

 

I then broke the class up into 5 groups, each group received a piece of flip chart paper with a question on it. They were also given markers and told to cross out unnecessary words, circle important words and add words if need be.

 

All of the groups performed very well, only one group insisted on adding a comma to their search which I was able to convince them was unnecessary. The favourite question was "Is there really a bus that is powered by cow poo?" That group ended up narrowing it down to "bus poo" and we received the results we were looking for. (It's true, there is a bus out there that is powered totally by cow manure).

 

After we had completed our searches, I then launched into a series of Google shortcuts that I felt was received very positively by the class.

 

These were:

 

Site searching:

Use the word site followed by a colon to search within a specific site:

Example: great fire of london site:bbc.co.uk

 

Translate:

       Type in Translate then your phrase and the languages you want.

       Example: Translate where is the nearest library English to Italian

 

Exclusion:

      Type in the "-" symbol to exclude certain web sites or phrases.

      Example: 1969 Apollo moon landing -Wikipedia

 

Define:

    Type in Define followed by a colon and the word for a quick definition.

    Example: define:agelast  (someone who never laughs)

 

Filetype:

     Type in the word filetype followed by a colon and the type of document you want. This will retrieve your search in only that kind of document.

     Example: attack on Pearl Harbour filetype:pdf

 

The "Vs." function:

      Type in a word, then Vs then another word to compare those items.

Example: bacon vs tofu (this will bring up a handy chart comparing their nutritional value)

 

I had a great time explaining the different techniques to the students and look forward to delivering more of the information literacy sessions in the future.