What Keywords Do I Still Need?

Word Post-Its

Objectives - ISTE NETS for Students #3: Research and Information Fluency

"plan strategies to guide inquiry"

"locate information from a variety of sources and media"

• think of alternate words for more powerful queries
• use sources such as a dictionary, thesaurus and search results to find alternate words

Materials

post-it type notes and pencils

Directions

This activity is recommended before students begin a research project. Once they have a problem or question to research, lead them in thinking about keywords that describe the Who, What, Where, When and Why of the problem or topic.

Hand out the post-it notes and have students write down words that stand for important ideas. Encourage them to think of as many words for the important ideas as they can. Refer them to a dictionary, thesaurus, encyclopedia to hunt for additional words. You may want to try searching using keywords and see what additional keywords may be found in the results (snippets).

This activity lends itself to concept mapping, arranging the words in clusters showing their relationships.

Besides the obvious benefits gained from mapping out the problem and its parts, this activity may be used in the context of searching. Point out that when searching online, they may have to try several of the words before they get good results.

©2008 Information Fluency