What's Inside

Welcome to the University of Minnesota's online workshop on Savvy Web Searching. The goal of this workshop is to help you create savvy web surfers who are able to find high quality information sources and appraise critically these resources (and other information sources) in terms of purpose, authority, accuracy, currency/timeliness, and coverage.

How to Use this Tutorial

Using the menu at the left you can enter this workshop at any point. If you're a first-time visitor, we suggest that you begin with the mini-workshop on video. It consists of six short videos on how your students are working with the web and methods you can use to help them do this work more effectively, efficiently, and critically.

The Savvy Web Searching portion reprises in written form the material contained in the video mini-workshop. In Beyond Google we provide tips on making your searches more effective, including links to reviews articles, and charts on search tools. This portion also has links to tools that allow you to understand and search the deep or invisible web.

In the portion on Evaluating Web Content, you will find five tips for content evaluation and a set of links to articles and tutorials on evaluation of web-based resources.

To get you started on creating your own assignments we have put links to sample assignments, sources of inspiration, and advice on devising webquests and pathfinders in the Sample Assignments portion.

Finally, in Coping with Link Rot, we offer a set of strategies for coping with rotten links – those pesky Not found Error 404 messages you get when a URL no longer points to a live web page.

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