Many classroom projects require you to research material, whether this is from a book from the library, talking face to face with experts, or using an online search engine.
This article will deal with finding information on the web, and this is an easy and fast way to gather it.
There are a couple of points to remember before you start.
1. Not all information found on the web is fact. A lot of information is put there by people who think they know the answer and not by true experts. A good example of this are sites like Wikianswers or Answers.com. These are community websites where people post a question and someone else tries to answer it for them based on their own experience. Not all the answers are correct. If you find a point of information, the best thing to do is first check the credentials of the author and then see if you can find the same information from another source to back it up.
2. Everything worth collecting on the web actually belongs to someone so you have a moral and maybe even a legal obligation to acknowledge them.
Okay, you have been tasked with finding information for a certain project. The first thing to do is start a research base, somewhere you can collect this information and save it for later use. The easiest way to do this is to open a Word document. This will be where you copy and paste all your findings. Never try to print a webpage straight from the site. You may find that the webpage is much bigger than you realise.
Now open your internet browser and head to your favorite search engine. Mine is the good old favorite Google. It has less clutter than most and has been going a lot longer too. A lot of the others tend to be more commercially based so if you type in your keyword, eg 'apples', you will probably get adverts for businesses that sell apples.
Now we have both the Word document open and the web browser on the search engine page, it's time to type in the keywords. Here is where a lot of students trip up. Remember that the search engine will look for every word you type, so if you typed in 'apple pictures' in the Google images section you would possibly get all sorts of pictures, graphics and diagrams with the slightest link to the word apples. If you just typed in the word 'apples' then you would get pictures of apples. It makes it quicker to find what you are looking for if you keep the keywords as simple as possible.
Now let's say we want to find how to to bake an apple pie. Go to the web section of Google and type in either 'how to bake an apple pie' or 'apple pie recipe'. This will bring up lots of links to recipe and how to pages. Your next step is to scan down the list and pick one. This page will probably have sponsors, so you will get adverts in the borders. Unfortunately this is something we have to deal with these days, and a lot of websites are funded by these sponsors so if they weren't there, neither would the website.
We see the instructions and apple pie recipe on the page, so we want to keep that, but not all the adverts. First left click and drag the cursor over the text we want, to highlight it. With your cursor still over the hightlighted section, right click and copy the text.
We now bring up the Word document. We can do this by either clicking on the tab in the bottom bar, or pressing Alt, Tab. With the Word document up we place our cursor on the page, right click and paste our recipe onto the page. There may be unwanted objects that came with it from the website like table borders. You can usually clean these out by clicking on the table border to highlight it and then pressing delete. Also don't forget you have to acknowledge the source so either type it under the text or switch back to the website and copy and paste the information.
This is the basic operation for all findings, whether it be text or images. You should soon have several pages of research material to work from. What you do with it now is up to you. You could just post or print that as your project, as long as everything is ackowledged, but your teacher would probably send it back to you as not finished. You have to show that you understand the information you have found and have actually read it. To do that, you should write your own paper using the information, but in your own words. At the bottom of your paper there should be a bibliography, which is a list of all your sources.
A parting note. A lot of good information can be found on Wikipedia. This is a great site, with lots of links to extra information. It also has the added feature of stating whether the information is confirmed or not. A wiki is a web page of information on a certain subject built by several contributors. Each time a new peice of information is added, it will show as unconfirmed until other contibutors have confirmed it.
Wikipedia is just that, an encyclopedia of wikis, and is one of the most sucessful and useful websites around.
If you have any questions or comments, you can either leave them in the comments section or see me at school and I will promise to deal with them
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