Internet Research Skills Worksheets

These worksheets are great to help students learn more about the Internet. If you would like to test your students ability to use the Internet as a Research tool we have a great set of Internet Research worksheets.

Internet Research Teacher Resources

How to Improve Your Internet Research Skills

Research is one of the essential functions required in today's day and age. Whether knowingly or unknowingly, we research multiple things every day. Remember how your friend asked you which place to hang out next?

When you were looking for places to go in your city, that's research. Remember when your colleague asked you your opinion on a particular celebrity and their best performances, and you went to Wikipedia to look up their filmography? That's research. Of course, you already realize you have to do tons of research in school and colleges and even on your job. It makes for a major part of the research you have to do.

How the Internet Has Changed Research: Importance of Learning Internet Research

The internet's ubiquity has made research both difficult and easy at the same time. Let's look at the positives first. The internet has given us one of the complete repositories of information humanity has ever known. You can find vast armadas of information from all ages on almost all topics on the internet. All this information is accessible to us at the click of a button, and this is the most significant achievement of the internet.

Another big plus is that the Internet is accessible anywhere at any time. The previous restrictions of finding a good library, finding a book, then adhering to the times of issue and library's opening and closing times are now meaningless. Also, with the availability of interviews, tutorials, and classes online of subject matter experts, access to high-quality information has never been this easy.

On the other hand, there are also multiple challenges that the internet presents that were not present to the researcher of yesteryears.

Too much available information presents a unique task of differentiating helpful information from useless information. Skimming through all this information and separating useful from useless is a time-consuming and skill-testing task that requires much effort.

The ability to separate useful from the highly abundant irrelevant material is indeed an art and a skill in addition. Another unignorable fact is that there are innumerable instances where false and inaccurate information is displayed on the internet. These reasons make it pertinent for modern-day researchers to acquire internet research skills.

You can develop this skill like any other skill in the world. If you want to improve your internet research skills, you'll find the following five points quite pertinent. These tips will assist you in refining your research skills. If done properly, your research will be faster and require less effort. Read on to find out!

Five Essential Tips for Improving Your Internet Research Skills

1. Plan Bottom Up

There is a tendency to get first intimidated when you see the sheer quantum of information available to a user when they embark on online research. This issue is compounded by the fact that the information's authenticity is more often than not questionable. You might have to sift to separate fact from fiction and valuable from useless. In this scenario, a recommended way forward would be to break down your required research topic into sub-topics that can be researched individually.

This allows you to go into the depth of the information and leads you to accurate sources on which you can base your remaining research. It also helps you research important topics now that you have broken them down into smaller bits, and it is doable in smaller and more manageable chunks.

2. Organize Your Sources

While you will see that it is possible to research essential topics by doing so in smaller doable chunks, you will also feel that it often gets confusing once you've collected a lot of information. The key here is to organize your information so that required information is available to us when we want it without too much effort being placed into retrieving it. You can organize your internet sources in many ways. For example, you can save helpful research links by adding them to your web browser's bookmarks.

Adding useful links to bookmarks will keep a record and keep you organized. In addition, you can keep an annotated bibliography of material you require keeping for your research when you can use it at will when you require it. You can also make folders as per the subtopics of your research. Bookmark folders will help you find the source of whatever you are quoting in your research while maintaining a complete record. These tips should not be foregone at any cost, especially for an academic researcher.

3. Understand How to Use the Web Brower Properly

The first and foremost thing you need to master to improve your internet research skills is using the web browser properly. Over time, web browsers have evolved, and to be a good researcher, you must be aware of those changes and know how to handle them.

You need to know all the key shortcuts like:

- Ctrl + W or Ctrl + F4 to close the current tab
- Ctrl + Shift + W or Alt + F4 to close the current window altogether
- Alt + Left arrow open the last page from your browsing history

These shortcuts increase your internet searching speed and make the process easy and hassle-free.

4. Using Keywords

Using keywords is a great way to narrow down your search on the internet. Using keywords allows the internet to produce relevant hits on the search bar from which you can choose your desired search. Keywords work to limit your search and show only the related topic in the results. By enclosing the critical words with quotation marks, the search engine will streamline your search showing you the exact information you need.

Using keywords saves a lot of time and effort. It helps you avoid going off-topic or getting distracted or overwhelmed by the sheer volume of irrelevant data available on the internet.

5. Find Subject Matter Experts

The Internet has made industry leaders and subject matter experts more accessible than ever. Before the internet was widely available, people accessed their ideas through books, lectures, seminars, letters, and even in-person meetings.

While those things are still useful today, with the internet, you can search their research papers, interviews, and video lectures and join them for virtual meetings. The use of varied sources will enable your research to go to unprecedented heights and assist you in achieving your goals.

Our Concluding Thoughts

The Internet is one of the best tools available to us humans today. The scope of research has been broadened since a wealth of information is now available at a researcher's fingertips. You can overcome some challenges with the effective use of organization and ingenuity. If properly used, the internet can be the most significant assist that a researcher can ever use if they want to take his research to an optimal level.