IETA 2024

Digitized information continues to grow at a rapid pace. Fortunately teachers are there to curate, guide, and scaffold how children access information. However, children utilize resources beyond those provided by teachers and often turn to the open web to find additional informational resources. Learning to search and identify helpful information requires learning effective strategies for searching for information on the internet. In this workshop, we will break down the search process into its primary steps, including: defining the task, choosing an appropriate search tool, building a query, evaluating the results, searching for more/different information. For each of these steps, there are child-specific needs that are different than those of adults, they need additional or different support to accomplish these tasks, and there are ways to scaffold and teach children to be better searchers. We will address these aspects and how different search tools (e.g. traditional search tools, or voice tools, or even ChatGPT) change the way these need to be addressed, but all have particular child-specific needs that should be considered and addressed.