Teacher’s Notes

Lesson 1: Technology and the Research Process

Background Information

In today’s lesson, you will explain the steps in the research process and introduce
a few basic online tools that will help your students with their research. The Tech Tools featured in this lesson are discussed in more detail below.

Search engines

Search engines are like the card catalogue of the World Wide Web. There are many search engines to choose from, including Google (http://www.google.com/), Ask.com (http://www.ask.com/), Answers.com (http://www.answers.com/), Snap (http://www.snap.com/), KartOO (http://www.kartoo.com/), Soople (http://www.soople.com/), Yahoo! (http://www.yahoo.com/), AltaVista (http://www.altavista.com/), and Dogpile (http://www.dogpile.com/). They all vary in the way they present and prioritize search results and in the tools they offer. Lesson 2 will focus more closely on search engines.

Online databases

Online databases are like file cabinets for the World Wide Web, holding collections of information that can’t always be accessed through search engines. When you use an online database, you are looking through a smaller amount of data—such as magazines, journals, and newspapers—within a single resource, such as a library or a museum. For example, ERIC (Educational Resources Information Center, http://www.eric.ed.gov/) is a database of educational material for teachers and students supported by the U.S. Department of Education, Institute of Education Science.

Podcasts

Podcast is a blend of the words iPod and broadcast. Podcasters create broadcasts using a computer microphone and free, downloadable software such as Audacity (http://audacity.sourceforge.net/) for PCs or Garageband (part of the iLife suite), for Macintosh computers. Podcasts can be posted to online services, such as iTunes, and downloaded for free to a computer, an iPod, or an MP3 player. People of all ages are podcasting about every imaginable topic. Check out some podcasts for teachers at http://teacherspodcast.org/. Podcasting is ideal for middle school students. The impressive finished product is relatively easy to create and can be shared safely with a broad audience.

Lesson Plan

Objective for Lesson 1: Students will be introduced to the steps in the research process and to a few technology tools that will help them with their research.

Introducing the lesson

•  Discuss the definition of research. Help students understand that they conduct research all the time; any time they seek information, they are doing research.

Brainstorm some common types of research in which students might frequently engage: finding the meaning of a word they don’t know, looking up information about a favorite team or musical group, looking for pictures of the new pop culture diva, and so on.

•  Invite students to talk about types of research they have done.

Presenting the lesson

Use the information provided in the slides to explain the research process. Reinforce the idea that students will use some of the same research strategies discussed in the introduction. Listed below are some possible ways to extend the discussion.

•  Choose and focus your subject Discuss the subject presented in the lesson and help students think of other subjects that might be appropriate for classroom research. You might practice narrowing down one of these subjects to arrive at a narrow topic.

•  Think about the audience Consider the possible audience for a student’s research project. Identify the real people, other than the teacher, who will read the pieces. One easy way to give students an authentic audience is to post students’ work on a school or classroom Web site where it can be accessed by students, faculty, parents, and others outside the immediate class.

•  Think about the purpose Set a purpose other than meeting the requirements for a grade. One suggestion is to have the students protest something in local, national, or international news.

•  Ask questions Think of additional questions the student could ask about the topic presented in the lesson.

•  Find your sources Ask students where they would typically go to find information. They may say that they would use a search engine such as Google. Explain that using Google is just one way of finding sources, but there are many other good ways to identify sources of information.

•  Make a source list Reiterate the importance of listing sources, especially when using the Internet, so that students can easily find Web sites again when the need arises. Inform students that, at the end of the project, they will need to hand in a list of all the sources they have used.

•  Take notes Compare research project note taking to other note taking experiences students have had in your classroom or other classrooms. Invite students to discuss previous experiences with taking notes. Explain that the specific format described in this lesson is similar to graphic organizers or other tools they have already used.

•  Organize your information Inform students that outlining is a very common organizational strategy for research projects. If outlining is a new experience for your students, model a simple outline structure for them on the board.

•  Write a draft Ask students to identify good drafting strategies they have used before. These might include writing effective leads or theses, developing paragraphs with a main idea and supporting details, transitioning between paragraphs, and using organizational strategies.

•  Publish your research Help students understand that publishing simply means getting the final product in front of its intended audience. Ask them to think of other publishing possibilities aside from the ones listed on the slide.

•  Tech Tool: Podcasts Find out what experiences students have had with podcasting. Do your students subscribe to and listen to any podcasts on a regular basis? Listen to the model podcast included in the lesson and ask students what they notice about it. Encourage students to draw conclusions about the types of information the middle school students shared, the guiding question or purpose they might have started with, how they communicated with their audience, and how effective the podcast was.

Talk About It

Students might be familiar with using search engines but have less experience with the other tools covered in this lesson. They might need a little more prompting to think about possibilities for using online databases, and podcasting. When discussing question 3—“How might these technology tools make research easier for you?”—help students think of possibilities for locating information and reporting their findings to an audience, using the tools covered in the presentation.

Your Turn

Decide whether you want students to complete the activity in class or outside of class and whether they will use a computer or complete the task on paper. If students need additional support in the activity, you could show them the second Your Turn slide, which gives a frame for each answer, or the Possible Responses slide, which shows complete suggested answers.

Following Up on the Lesson

•  Using a computer or a piece of paper, have students brainstorm a list of at least ten topics they might like to research for this project or for a future project. Have them indicate their top three choices.

•  Ask students to write one thing they learned from today’s lesson and either one question they have or one thing they would like to know more about.

Research Strand

You might like to use the fifteen Writing and Research in a Digital Age lessons to guide your students through a complete research project. If so, you will need to make decisions about the type of project you want your students to do and whether it will be a whole-group, small-group, or individual project. The Teacher’s Notes for each lesson will offer practical hints to help you keep the project moving.

For this lesson, introduce the plan you have made for your students to do a research project. In the next lesson, students will learn more about choosing a topic and forming a research question.


Differentiated Experiences

Challenge

Students can create symbols to represent the steps in the research process or design a chart that compares the steps in the research process to the steps in the writing process.

Extra Support

Provide students with a simple flow chart of the steps in the research process. Include simple images to support the text in the chart.

PLEASE NOTE

Some of the Web sites discussed in this lesson may require a student to register or create an account in order to use the featured online tools. Please remind students never to give personal information on a site without a parent’s or guardian’s permission. Also, Web sites can change frequently, both in content and functionality. Before sending students to a suggested Web site, you may want to preview the site and confirm the provided instruction still aligns with the content and navigational features of the site.

Original content Copyright © by Holt, Rinehart and Winston. Additions and changes to the original content are the responsibility of the instructor.

Writing and Research in a Digital Age 3 Level One Teacher’s Notes