lesson 4Contextualized Online Search and Research Skills.pptx

empowement technologies lesson

1. Contextualized Online Search and Research Skills Lesson 4

2. Research Skills Research skill refers to the ability to search for, locate, extract, organize, evaluate and use or present information that is relevant to a topic. These skills collectively will help you to find answers to a question or solutions to a problem.

3. Tips in Improving Online Research Skills 1. Proper Use of Online Search Engine & Learning Tools Search engines are software systems that are designed to search for information on the World Wide Web. Major search engines include Google, Yahoo (which uses Google), AltaVista, Bing, and Lycos.

4. 2. Analyze the Credibility of Your Source Anybody can publish their work or opinions on the internet. While you should not limit your research to a couple of articles, you should discern the source’s credibility. You can assess and analyze the credibility by always remaining vigilant.

5. Evaluating Websites To help you evaluate the website’s credibility, here are the questions that you need to answer: a. What is the domain type of the website? If it is a personal website, then you should further evaluate the website.

6. b. Who wrote the article? Check if the author’s credentials are listed so you can tell whether or not the author is qualified to write the topic. c. What is the purpose of the document? It is important to check the document’s purpose and why it was produced. The document must be objective.

7. d. When was the document published and updated? The document should be regularly updated. As to the freshness of the date, it depends on the information needed. For some topics you want current information.

8. 3. Cross-Check Your Information You now know where to and how to collect information from credible sources. Cross-checking the information you collected is integral in enhancing your research skills. You should not get stuck on just one webpage. Stick to sources that have made their reputation providing quality information.

9. 4. When searching online, narrow your topic. Identify the key concepts or important ideas. Do not type the whole question in the search box. Typing the whole question often leads to a large number of inappropriate search results.

10. Narrowing Searches through Special Operators and Advanced Search – (Negative Symbol): adding it before a word will tell Google to ignore pages that use that word prominently. “” (Quotation Marks): When you surround your search terms with quotation marks, you are telling Google that the words must appear as an exact phrase.

11. .. (Two Periods): this operator means ‘between’, and is used in the context of numbers. * (Asterisk): the asterisk symbol means is translated as ‘wildcard’. Wildcards are placeholders, which can be replaced by any word or phrase. This can be useful if you’ve forgotten parts of a word or phrase.

12. Searching “define:” with a colon and your word in question will return the definition of the word you’re looking for. The Advanced Search feature of the Google can be used also to narrow the results of the search.