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.

Check your readiness

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. Computer lab with projector
2. Access to the internet
3. 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

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 appropriately.

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 bandwidth internet access is available, individual activities may be done.

1. Make a mind map for the topic or issue you want to research about.
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, based on the importance and relevance of the resource for your learning, and give the reasons for your ranking; this analysis of resource accessed is called meta data of a resource. You can also type in your own comments and ideas about the topic in the same text document.

Portfolio

1. You would have developed a concept map for the topic that you want to research onn
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.