Surfing the Net with Kids Newsletter: Online Research

September 25, 2002

Dear Reader,

1) Yesterday we added over fifty printable word search puzzles
with answer keys to the Printables Club. Members can check them
out by logging in here. The
rest of you can see them by signing up for a free trial membership.

2) For those of you with educational and family-oriented Web sites,
Surfnetkids has expanded our offering of f^ree online content to
include a semi-monthly feature titled “Best of Surfing the Net
with Kids.” Just place a small piece of code on your Web site,
and without any additional effort (or cost) you’ll be displaying
topical site reviews from our extensive archive. Wow!
Sign up at: https://www.surfnetkids.com/daily.html

Today’s newsletter is brought to you by the following sponsors. Please take a look at their offers; without their support, this newsletter wouldn’t be possible.

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See ya on the Net,
Barbara J. Feldman
“Surfing the Net with Kids”

P.S. This week Printables Club Members also:
   1) learn about two online language translation sites
   2) learn about a personal collection of over 1200 international banknotes
   3) learn about a site that lets kids profit from selling t-shirts, hats and mugs printed with their artwork
   4) get a two-page Internet enrichment printable of today’s topic

Click here to Become a Printables Club Member
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Online Research and Web Site Evaluation

https://www.surfnetkids.com/research.htm

Knowing how to use a search engine and follow hyperlinks is not the same as knowing how to use the Internet for research. Serious research requires authoritative sources, and since anyone can publish a Web page, it is important to be able to evaluate what you find online. Today’s selections take a look at the whole research process: finding useful sites, evaluating them, and creating bibliographic citations.

http://www.classzone.com/books/research_guide/

This tutorial to teach middle-school students to research, evaluate and cite Web sites starts with a quiz to evaluate how much you already know about using the Internet. Next, you’ll find five lessons, starting with an exploration of the Internet versus the Library. “Why use both? Because each has resources, benefits, and limitations that the other does not.” The Teacher Guide provides a short overview of the site, along with a single-page glossary of terms used throughout the tutorial.

http://school.discovery.com/schrockguide/eval.html

To help even the youngest of students to think critically about Web sites, Kathy Schrock has designed three grade-appropriate site evaluation forms. The first is for elementary grades (“Do the pictures and photographs on the page help you learn?”); the second for middle school (“Is the information on the page useful for your project?”); and the third for high-school students (“Would it have been easier to get the information somewhere else?”) All three are also available in Spanish and in Acrobat Adobe PDF (for ease of printing.)

http://www.noodletools.com/noodlequest/

Wow! This amazing research tool actually answers the inevitable first question: “Where do I start?” Just answer the seven multiple-choice questions starting with “Are you a kid, pretty new to the Internet, or an Internet wizard?” and click “Show Me a Research Strategy.” This is my pick of the day because of the variety and quality of the research sites it unearths. Book mark Noodle Quest now.

http://www.nutsandboltsguide.com/evidence.html

Although written for college students, I found Nuts and Bolts equally applicable to high-school students. “College essays stand or fall based largely on their use of evidence. In this section we’ll consider how to do research, how to avoid common problems with using source material, and how to follow major citation styles for the humanities, the social sciences, and the natural sciences.” Pay particular attention to the discussion of open and closed searches, and the section on plagiarism.

http://owl.english.purdue.edu/workshops/pp/Internet.ppt

The free PowerPoint viewer is required to view this Purdue University Writing Lab workshop. Windows users can get one from here; Mac users can download theirs from here. Once the slide show is opened, use a single mouse click anywhere on a slide to proceed to the next slide. A right-mouse click will open a navigational menu with additional selections such as full-screen or reverse. For your efforts, you’ll be rewarded with a nice introduction to online research and criteria for Web site evaluation.

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