Acquiring Information from Electronic Resources
As electronic sources become more available and the amount of information continues to grow, students face the dilemma of “Where do I get the best information?” and “What information do I trust?” To this end, schools must help their students acquire research skills through the development of questioning techniques. Strong questioning skills are an essential element in the use of technology for research; it is the difference between the information literate and the casual Web surfer. In this lesson, you learn, through practice, how to conduct a productive internet search that yields relevant information. You also learn how to organize the data once it has been collected from electronic resources.
Evaluating & Citing Electronic Resources
Research begins with developing questions related to a topic. These questions lead you to the discovery of information, which may include a multitude of facts and ideas. Collecting data may easy, but creating meaning from the data is far more difficult, but certainly a worthwhile endeavor. Once the data collection begins, a means for establishing criteria for reliability of information becomes necessary. As data is collected, citation information is accumulated, ready to be assembled when the project is complete. In this lesson, you will learn practical strategies to evaluate web resources. You will also learn how to build an evaluation tool that will aid you and your students’ research endeavors. Finally, you will learn how to cite electronic resources.
Storing & Retrieving Electronic Information
This module looks at three aspects of the concept of storing and retrieving data. The first section of this lesson looks at the process of getting all forms of data (numbers, text, sound, video, etc.) into a computer so that it can be manipulated. The second section deals with determining an organized way to store the data. The final section expands the notion of data storage and retrieval to the Internet as a whole and shows how to transfer files between two different computers using FTP.