Cherene suggested having students review and critique a particular topical web site. I think this would be an outstanding idea. The teacher could begin the class with a discussion/critique of a particular site, and then ask students to critique a site of their own. She could pick a few sites and have students do the assignment in groups of 3-5, or pairs, or individually. Each group could write a post and others could comment, or each group could write their critiques in the comments on the original post. They could use the comments to review during the start of the next class.
Another possibility (or perhaps a task for another post) would be to use a customized search engine to constructively restrict students' searching. If a teacher already has a list of 6-10 sites, Google has a feature that allows you to make an ad-free search engine that's limited to the sites you want. The blog post could link to the page, instruct students to type in the address, or simply insert the search engine into the post, like this:
The Arctic
This particular search engine used web sites that I put together for the third grade during their Arctic Animal research projects. Try it out and see what you think!
Students could search in pairs/groups/individually for information on their project and post one interesting fact or a reflection in the comments. John suggested that students could be required to use both a book and the internet to find facts: those who find facts in books can type 2-3 sentences in the same way that the internet searchers do.
This is an alternative to documenting their research process in their science notebooks, so it meets both the "internet research" and the "electronic journaling" EETT goals.
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