Incorporating Information Literacy into the Classroom

• Brainstorm the meaning of information literacy (IL) as a class or in small groups.

• What other types of literacy are important? Financial, visual?

• How is information literacy a lifelong learning topic?

• Discuss the differences between information and knowledge and data.

• In an existing career exploration assignment, ask students to explain how IL skills could apply to their ideal jobs. 

• Pick an event that occurred at least one year ago and distribute to small groups different types of sources covering the same event (i.e. Tweet, newspaper article, news broadcast, scholarly journal article, scholarly book, popular book, documentary film). Ask groups to explore how values, perspectives, and editorial processes shaped their source. Have groups present their findings. (See more.)

• Lead a Socratic exercise to help students articulate the type of information they need to complete a given task and how different formats have different appropriate uses. (See more.)

• What is the purpose of research?

• What are the traits of successful researchers?

• What role does topic choice have on the success of your research?

• Have groups create a digital or paper mind map of related concepts and search terms for a topic.

• Ask students to find an encyclopedia entry about their topic to get introductory information.

• Have students turn topics into research questions and ask each other who, what, where, when, why questions to narrow their research scope.

• Create imaginary thesis statements and have students suggest terms that would help narrow their topic.

• Search some of their terms in Google, RitzDiscovery, and specific databases, to generate ideas about narrowing or broadening their topic.