Last week, one of the teachers I work with came to me with a dilemma. In a few months, his fourth graders will participate in their annual State Night. To prepare for this event, students choose a state to learn more about. Their findings form the basis of a presentation given to an audience of peers, teachers, parents and other members of our school community. My teacher colleague has expressed a desire to expand the resources his students use for research from encyclopedias and reference books to websites and information databases available through our school library. His concern, however, was that their note-taking skills were not up to par with the amount of information available on the Internet and that, in frustration, they simply relied on copy-and-paste to create the majority of their reports. quickly identified several strategies this teacher could use to avoid this situation: Generate an essential question, such as “Why would a person want to live in or visit this state?” force students to give an answer composed of original thoughts, rather than simply coming up with an answer; educate students about plagiarism; and directly teach paraphrasing and note-taking strategies. However, an idle comment from the teacher produced the most interesting strategy on our part. That comment was: "My only concern is that if they just Google they will produce rubbish - stuff from Wikipedia and Ask Yahoo!". How can I get them to look beyond the first few results their search query produces?” (Fairchild, D, personal communication, November 2, 2010). We decided that before we could spend time on any of the other ideas we had generated, we needed to dedicate a few class hours teaching kids how to... middle of paper ......revised November 8, 2010 http://www.ade.state.az.us/standards/technology/Articulated_Grade_Level/EdTechStandardPreK-6bystrand. pdfFitzgerald, M. (1999). Evaluating information: an information literacy challenge. School Library Media Research, 2. Retrieved November 8, 2010, from http://www.ala.org/ala/mgrps/divs/aasl/ aaslpubsandjournals/slmrb/slmrcontents/volume2 1999/vol2fitzgerald.cfmLaureate, Education, Inc. (Producer) Program Number 3: Literacy Processes and Learning in the Information Age. Author. Lee, M. and Baylor, A. (2006). Designing metacognitive maps for web-based learning. Educational Technology and Society, 9(1), 344-348. Retrieved November 8, 2010, from http://www.ifets.info/journals/9_1/28.pdfMankato, MN Home Page. (n.d.). Retrieved November 9, 2010, from http://descy.50megs.com/Emankato/mankato.html