With computers now integral to everyday life, the awareness of children to this powerful tool needs to be nurtured from early on, and a move from traditional “book and pen” kind of learning is necessary to provide children with the tools they will need to progress in the Information Age.

While no single course can claim to do everything, both the DigiTitans and ICTopia series are designed to provide a progressive learning experience, representing a practical approach to computer learning through interactive lessons and activities made to create a sense of adventure with the inquisitive minds of children as they acquaint themselves with the essence of information technology.

As the year closes, Google extends is Internet search market share lead over rivals Yahoo! and Microsoft. According to ComScore figures:

Google’s share increased 0.4 percentage points to 63.5 percent from October to November, while Yahoo dropped 0.1 percentage points to 20.4 percent and Microsoft dropped 0.2 percentage points to 8.3 percent.

Further down the pecking order, Ask.com dropped 0.2 percentage points to 4.0 percent and AOL rose 0.1 percent to 3.8 percent, ComScore said.

Source: CNet

One of my favorite online destinations for research is Wikipedia but some of our teachers would warn us against using it for doing research. This is mostly due to the fact that articles in Wikipedia can be written and edited by anyone and there are times when articles would contain incorrect and misleading information. Using these incorrect pieces of information in our research would affect the accuracy of our work.

Still, while it may take a bit more research skill to make sure that what is found in a Wikipedia article is credible as a source, Wikipedia can still be used as a tool for initial research.

Wikipedia provides a wealth of information on many topics. As of this writing, Wikipedia already has 2,420,000 articles in English. It covers the same topics that one can find in the Encyclopedia Britannica but (in most cases) with more current information. It even features up-to-date information on recent events and popular personalities.

So say, we really need to do research on global warming. How do we use Wikipedia to give us a background on the topic? Here is how.

1.       Launch your favorite web browser. (I use Firefox!)

2.       Type www.wikipedia.org in your address bar then hit Enter.

3.       In the Wikipedia search bar, type your search terms, for example “global warming.”

4.       If Wikipedia finds an exact match of search terms to an article title, it will display that article

5.       Read the whole article and jot down important points.

6.       If you need more information about some words and terms, Wikipedia would often have those words as links to direct you to related articles.

7.       At the bottom part of the page, the article would also have the related topics which you might want to explore.

8.       You may also consult the sources cited by the article.

9.       You may also follow external links that would direct you to other articles on the Web that discuss the topic.

We must remember that Wikipedia and other websites give us information for us to gain more knowledge about these topics. However, if we are writing research papers and reports, we must always remember to avoid plagiarizing material. It is definitely easy to just copy and paste portions of text from Wikipedia and other websites but plagiarism is a dishonest way of doing research.