Improving Students' Web Use and Information Literacy: A Guide for Teachers and Teacher Librarians

Citation

Parry, F. (2012), "Improving Students' Web Use and Information Literacy: A Guide for Teachers and Teacher Librarians", The Electronic Library, Vol. 30 No. 1, pp. 147-148. https://doi.org/10.1108/02640471211204132

The author of this book is a lecturer in teacher librarianship with a prolific output over 30 years on school librarianship, the use of the internet in schools and information literacy. This new work aims to “change staff and students in schools from web users to critical web learners”, raise information literacy profile in schools and give new and existing teachers information on new or updated resources to use in class.

This is a short book, concisely written for ease of use by busy teachers whose area of expertise may not always include information literacy. The subtitle is “a guide for teachers and teacher librarians”, but as many schools nowadays just have teachers who are expected to do the work of librarians as time permits, the practical advice in this book is all the more welcome.

There is a deceptive amount of good quality information in these chapters and Herring carefully selects additional, usually online, information sources such as the Berkeley “Finding information on the internet” tutorial and Kathy Schrock's “The 5 Ws of website evaluation” guide to supplement his own advice.

There are several theoretical components, notably discussions about learning theory and information literacy models, but this book is primarily practical with several suggested templates for lesson planning or training exercises. Throughout, there is an emphasis on using the web purposefully, interactively and critically. There is a chapter on effective search techniques using general, specialist, visual and meta‐search engines and advanced search engine features such as domain, language and file type searching. This is followed by a very good chapter on evaluating websites for reliability and accuracy and another chapter on improving student use of the web. Herring is particularly taken with the interactive learning possibilities offered by Web 2.0 tools where students do not just search, surf and evaluate sites but can contribute in shaping their own information environment. If I have a criticism, it is that Herring does not deal with the very real issues of moderation, setting standards of behaviour and getting students to contribute to collaborative tools such as a wiki or blog. The penultimate two chapters on developing learning websites for student use are probably the best of the bunch and Herring sprinkles this chapter liberally with examples of good practice and “how to” sites.

This book comes highly recommended as it is pitched at just the right level to make sure that new teachers, in particular, can cover all the basics of using the web effectively and productively in schools.