Experimenting with Pathfinders

We’ve often been told that the current generation of students in our schools are the ‘Google Generation*’, a group of students who use the web with ease and feel that they have no need for books and traditional research as we know it.  What we’re seeing in schools however, is a generation of students who though they may use the internet widely, do so ineffectively and use only a very limited number of applications.  They may be a whiz at Facebook and MSN IM, but ask them a question and their primary search strategy is to type the whole thing into a Google searchbar and hit enter.  Sadly, many of their teachers are also at a similar stage, but being better at selecting key words, get better results with only a little more skill.  Though students are taught how to use advance searches and strategies in ICT, this is seldom backed up and would need consistent reinforcement to become the norm.

The difficulty that we face in library based research lessons is that there is neither the time or the space to teach these skills.  The library isn’t laid out as a classroom, and unless it’s a small group it’s nearly impossible for me to speak to a whole class all at once, let alone monitor their progress.  So more and more this year we’re going to be focusing on passing these skills on to teachers to drill down to their classes, and setting up Pathfinders for students. This involves breaking down the task of research into a series of stages and providing them with starting points, or sign posts long the way.  Often these also open up the possibility for talking through search strategies with individual groups, as by providing a clear direction, they are able to see quite clearly where they want their research to go.

The format of these Pathfinders is proving tricky to perfect as yet.  Unfortunately our VLE just, well, isn’t, so there’s no central space to display the information.  At the moment I’m experimenting with creating documents and webpages that will guide them through, but haven’t quite found the right formula.  What I need is something that our students can get to with one click from out home page.  You know, like a VLE…**  So at the moment we’re making good use of sites such as Diigo to collect key sites, and also Pearltrees, which allows you to display your links in a way with huge student appeal.  This is the Pearltree created for the Year 12 English groups who are just about to start studying The Great Gatsby:

Great Gatsby Pearltree (Sorry, it won't embed.)

Students were able to find starting points on many areas of interest and then take their research further using key words that they identified during their reading.  So far it’s working well!  We’ll continue to investigate and develop formats and presentation until something clicks, then feedback on the process.  Wouldn't it be great to use something like a VLE for this?  *winks at ICT people*  *bats eyelashes*

*And may I congratulate the writer of this article on his wonderful moustache.

**Apparently there is one, it just hasn’t been set up, and staff haven’t been trained on it.  This is hugely useful, as you can imagine.