ICT student textbook/The global digital library

The global digital library
In this activity, you will be introduced to methods of accessing, evaluating and organizing information from the internet.

Objectives

1. Understanding that the internet is a network of computers
2. Understanding that the world wide web is a global digital library
3. Getting familiar with using the web for accessing, downloading and organizing resources

What prior skills are assumed

1. You must be able to work with different applications - text editor, text processor, mind mapping tool, independently
2. You must be able to access, open, create and save files in your folder
3. You must have an understanding of the internet and be able to browse the web

What resources do you need

1. Working computer lab with projector
2. Computers installed with Ubuntu Operating System
3. Access to the internet
4. Handout for Firefox

What digital skills will you learn

1. Accessing the internet, searching for information
2. Downloading information
3. Evaluating the information and creating a personal digital library for self learning
4. Understand safe and ethical ways of using the internet

Description of activity with detailed steps

Teacher led activity

Demonstration 1
Your teacher will demonstrate for you how to access and organize information on the folder: follow along as she does the following

1. Use a search engine to search for information - discuss with your teachers what happens when we do not give good key words
2. Open the pages returned on each search
3. She will demonstrate how to search for images, videos and text
4. Download the resources accessed - the entire web page, image, videos, etc
5. Your teacher will discuss with you how to legally download materials from the internet and how to use it correctly.

Demonstration 2

1. Watch your teacher search for the following, "giraffe", "evolution of giraffe", "miraculous evolution of giraffe"
2. Did you see any difference in the pages returned by the search?
3. Does this tell you anything about how a search engine works? How can you search more effectively?

Student activities

This is an activity to be done in groups. If adequate internet access is there, individual activities may be done.

1. Make a concept map for the topic or issue about which you want to research.
2. In groups, access the internet and download information relevant to your topic.
3. Organize your downloaded information into folders
4. In a text document summarize what you have found on your topic. In your document, also give a ranking for your resources and give the reasons for your ranking; this analysis of resource accessed is called meta data of a resource.

Portfolio

1. You would have developed a concept map for the topic that you want to research on.
2. Your text document summarizing your internet research, which should contain links to web pages you have accessed
3. Your resource folder which should contain your concept map, text document with a summary of resources, images downloaded and web pages saved on the computer.