Accessing+Information

The first topic discussed was electronic resources. We learned what words to use while using search engines in order to generate the best results. Boolean Operators, such as "OR", "NOT", or "AND" will facilitate by eliminating topics that may be related to the subject, or that the person searching may not want to appear. The different starting places for searching online are search engine,s, subject directories, specialized databases (subscription databases).

The next topic was copyright. There are some sources, such as flickr, that will show users which materials are open for the public use with the author's consent. Even if there isn't a copyright policy, the source is still copyrighted. To help us better understand all of this, we watched the movie clip "The Tale of Two Fish".

Web Evaluations was the next topic covered. Different criteria that should be examined when evaluating a web page are author purpose (affiliation and objectivity), authority (credibility of author), currency, content (primary vs. secondary, serious vs. propaganda, style/language), web page/ site design, and audience. To further learning we evaluated web pages in and out of class.

We learned how to use the wiki which is useful in a classroom setting. We also learned how to generate surveys. Furthermore, after completing the survey, we learned how to use Microsoft Excel in order to generate other information, including averages and medians of the answers that students gave in the surveys.