Standards Lab

3-5.RI Research and Information Literacy- By the end of grade 5 each student will:

3-5.RI.4 understand that using information from a single Internet source might result in the reporting of erroneous facts and that multiple sources should always be researched.

My 5^th grade students are doing a research project on Spanish speaking countries. They have several facts that they need to look up about the country they are researching.  I have gotten on them many times about the sites they have been using because many of them just use ask.com or sites where anyone can answer questions that are asked. I remind them that there are several fact websites like National Geographic or Yahoo Kids for information. The first lesson would be on how to identify trust worthy websites, like how they have the green check next to the search result to say that is a trusted site or the certificates that are in the address bars.  I could create a lesson where I show students an answer on one of these question and answer websites and then go through the process of searching other reputable websites to see if the information is correct or not. I would also incorporate books that have been published on the country just to use a source that they are not familiar with looking at. I did get the opportunity to use the information that I learned about the search lab to help my students when they began their research.  At first they continued to type in every word for each question I had them to delete the bulk of what they wrote with a little grumbling and just put in most important parts of the question.  They were surprised that the results that came up were very relevant and they found the answers right away.