Use the Internet to Teach Information Literacy
• Planning—The students should brainstorm the best ways to find the information they seek. They must think about where to find the most reliable and pertinent information.
• Gathering—The students should use the identified resources to gather only relevant and useful information. If the Internet is not identified as the best information source for a topic, then students should not use it.
• Sorting and Sifting—The students should sort and sift through the information and identify and organize only those pieces that will lead to further insight into the question or problem at hand.
• Synthesizing—The students should consider the pieces of information identified during sorting and sifting and try to find relationships and patterns. This process will lead them to new insight.
• Evaluating—The students should evaluate what they have found and concluded and decide if more information is needed.
• Reporting—The students may go through the research cycle many times before proceeding to this final step. Now the students report their findings and recommendations. They may create persuasive presentations using presentation software.
Searching the Internet There will be many times when the Internet is the best resource for finding relevant information. Both teachers and students need to learn how to use it wisely. But, how can you possibly search the Internet with any accuracy when it is so vast? While most experts propose that it is impossible to precisely pinpoint the absolute size of the entire Internet, it is estimated that the Internet is com-
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