Teenagers are certainly digital natives and most of them are comfortable using computers for a lot of tasks. But even though they might seem like computer wizards compared to their parents thy are not very good at finding what they need online.

Information literacy is an essential competence is essential, but unlike many other computer related skills, it is not learned by osmosis. It requires that they know how to summarize their question, formulate a query and evaluate the search results.

Last year I published a short and easy guide on how to search the Web. Recently I came across a simple, three step guide to online searching for high school students. It is a check list helping young people to choose where to search for the information they want and to formulate a query that will help them to find it.

This guide is part of a larger guide to research developed by Springfield Township High School. In addition to the three steps to online searching, it contains succinct little chapters on these important subjects amongst others:

• Plagiarism
• Working with Online Sources
• Guidelines for Multimedia and Web Page Production
• Search Strategies

The guide is published under the Creative Commons Attribution Share Alike License, which means you are free to use the whole guide or parts of it as long as you indicate that it was produced by Springfield Township High School.

photo credit: danielfoster437