Which sites will provide you with accurate, non-biased, up to date and relevant information for a project you have been set? Effective internet research skills forms part of our digital literacy programme and we have a responsibility to guide our students to become internet-savvy users.
There are many websites, on-line journals etc, that we can recommend to our students as being useful for academic research purposes. Various on-line encyclopedias are also available and some of which we subscribe to. These are often recommended as your first 'port-of-call'.
Teaching our students to critically evaluate the website content to establish the authenticity of the information therein, using various techniques, is another way in which to develop research skills.
Once information from a website has been used, it is important for the students to reference or cite their resource accurately to avoid plagiarism. Simply copying text and pasting it into a project is just not good enough and the student must face the consequences of plagiarizing other people's work. The format for referencing sources varies according to the type of resource. The students must be made aware of different referencing systems, such as the Harvard referencing system, which is most often used in our tertiary institutions.
Avoiding plagiarism, copyright issues etc are just some of many other aspects of becoming digitally savvy and must form part of our digital literacy programme. It is important that our students leave the school well-prepared for the requirements of tertiary institutions. This topic will be expanded upon in future posts.
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