• Subscribe to our email newsletter and receive periodic updates about 21CIF including professional development opportunities and new resources.

• Digital Information Fluency (DIF) is the ability to find, evaluate and use digital information effectively, efficiently and ethically. 

• Every school administrator wants to maintain a safe distance between objectionable material and impressionable students. Blocking students from potential contact with sexual predators and other malinformation is absolutely well-intended. However, blocking sites does not help students think critically about the quality of the information they retrieve or prepare them for the real world of information they encounter outside of school.
• Teachers may contribute to the problem by introducing filters of their own into learning experiences. In practice, it works like this: a teacher wants her class to access digital information, so she conducts a search ahead of time and selects web pages she finds credible and appropriate. Students then engage in a Web quest using pages or sites that have approved content. Aside from the intended benefits of the exercise, the students have missed an opportunity to learn skills in searching and evaluating that they need in the 21st century.
• Our research suggests that students who search for digital information are better able to judge its credibility than students who are handed information. In a pilot study, over 100 middle school students were given a question and three relevant web pages for answering it. Two of these pages were credible. The success rate for answering the question using relevant information was 73% when the task involved reading the three pre-selected pages.

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• Evaluating Digital Information  

  Part Five of the series Five Things Today's Digital Generation Cannot do   (and what you can do to help) discusses how searchers have to invent their own evaluation standards because schools are not teaching them.
• Workshop Tutorials 

  The section on Investigative Searching is loaded with new ideas and activities to teach careful evaluation. Consider ways to use this resource in your class.
• Teacher's Guide: Personalized Evaluation Searches  

  How to use Rollyo, Swiki and Google Co-op to create personalized search engines for safe Web page evaluation practice at all grade levels.
• Teacher's Guide to Action Zone Evaluation Games  

  Recommended uses for the Bad Apple and Use It! or Lose It! evaluation games in this Kit, including tips and answers.
• IMSA Evaluation Wizard  

  How to use our Evaluation Wizard to assess how well students evaluate what they find online.

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• Information Fluency: It's Elemenatary

   

  Workshop materials focusing on Five Things Elementary Students Should Know before starting middle school. that makes creating MLA electronic

   

  Lots of new search challenges and lesson guides!online journal articles and reference databases.

• Indispensible ICT Tools for teachers

   

   

   

  The following list of ICT tools was crowd sourced from individual educationalists and not companies when the question 'What Indispensible ICT tools do you use in education' was asked  and is not meant to be exhaustive in any way. 

   

   

   

  This particular wiki was created by Drew Buddie attributions where possible are below.

   

   

   

  If adding to the list please try to keep the format of entries the same:  Product name in alphabetical order; How used; 'Free' if free.  Then put your name in alphabetical order in the contributors list at the bottom of the page.

   

   

• nvestigative Searching Tutorials

   

  Use these interactive tutorials to strengthen your skills locating and evaluating information
• • Diigo Users! Join the information Fluency Group to find more resources like this one!
  Add Sticky Note

• find, evaluate and use digital information effectivel
• question into a search query
• Develop and apply vocabulary building strategies
• effectively and efficiently select digital collections
• visible
• invisible
• • digital collections include specialized databases, web 2.0 networks, visible, opaque, and invisible databases.  

  • 2-3 carefully developed keywords should do it.
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  • • Scan Snippets for professional vocabulary to revise keywords

    • speculative searching
• (revision decision)
• internal content reliability
• external validation
• uthor/publisher reliability
• external validation
• decide whether or not to integrate digital information related to a specific information task
• credit to the source and/or author
• dispositions
• confidence in finding a solution
• persistence to continually engage
• focus to avoid distractions
• open-mindedness to a variety of strategies
• curiosity for exploring ideas
• • Fact Checking: get three reliable sources for essential facts. Find them with tools outside of the website. 

  • See Evaluation Wizard. Author / Publisher reliability on demand training
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  • • Internal content can deceive.  Always to external when the game's afoot!

    • Investigative Searching
• • Keywords: copyright, creative commons, fair use

  • Ethical use and evaluation are linked. Too often citation is seen as tedious academic overhead. 
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  • • Citation skills as detective notes. Shift emphasis to the investigative skills needed to create a citation.  See Citation Wizards and games. 
• • This is the essence of critical thinking.

  • Dispositions = habits of mind
• 

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