"CONTEXTUALIZED ONLINE SEARCH AND RESEARCH SKILLS; APPLIED PRODUCTIVITY TOOLS WITH ADVANCED APPLICATION TECHNIQUES"

What is Research?

In our world of expanding access to the Internet, research has become a common term that is used when "looking for something".

What are the Research Skills Need to Develop?

Check your Sources

• Evaluate the information you gather from your sources, whether they are from books, online articles, news sites, or websites

Ask Good Questions

• Be specific when entering queries into search engines

Go beyond the Surface

• Try looking for more than one sources rather than sticking to one source

Be Patient

• You just need to think critically and synthesize the data you have gathered until you can formulate your conclusions

Respect Ownership

• Anything on the internet has its perspective owner. Illegal acquisition, distribution, or reuse of any of these may result in copyright infringement

Use Your Networks

•  Social media can provide various and nuanced perspectives on the information you need

ICT Tools Useful in Research

The following are websites, web tools, and online documents that may provide you with better access to the information you are looking for.

Google Search

• Is the most popular and powerful search engine in the 21st century. It is capable of searching the web through voice input and filtering the results according to your behavioral data gathered by the search engine

Google Scholar

• It is another product from Google, gives users especially researchers, a simpler way to search for scholarly literature on the Internet

Online Journal

• Are scholarly publications released in a format accessible via the Internet, in other words, journals that are kept in your school libraries and other libraries in the world are kept in the Cloud or Internet in digital format

Research and Information Seeking

One of the ideal applications laid down for ICT and the World Wide Web is for research and education.

There are several information sources over the internet, some of those are presented below.

Web Search Engines

•  These are programs designed to search or mine the World Wide Web-based on keywords provided by the user

Research Indexing Sites

• These are Web sites dedicated to compiling and index researches done by academic researchers, engineers, social scientists, and so on

Massive Online Open Course (MOOC)       sites or tutorial sites 

•  These are Web sites dedicated to teach and inform users focused on different areas

Employment Web Sites

• These are Web sites that enable companies to post job vacancies

Electronic commerce (E-commerce)

• This is a technology that uses electronic means to trade products and currencies

Application Tools

Mail Merge

Is a software toolkit that is used to produce multiple documents with a given template, editing the basic information that is supplied by a structured dataset.

Steps using Mail Merge:

1. Create a dataset with title headings on a spreadsheet application.

2. Create a template of the letter or document that will receive the dataset in a word processor.

3. Insert the label of customized detail in the word processor and insert the label that corresponds to the spreadsheet.

4. Select the option preview in the word processor to generate all of the pages with different information.

Hyperlink

Is a reference to another file that is represented by a word, an image, or any document element on a document processor. There are two types of links.

Anchor link

✔This is a hyperlink that points to a portion of the same document

Inline link

✓ This is a hyperlink wherein the content is located in other or remote link

Hyperlink Utilization

A. Hyperlinking in Word Processors

1. Creating your file to be hyperlinked

a. Start by writing your texts in the word processor. 

b. Highlight the word that you are targeting to set up a link.

c. Then right-click on the highlighted link to access more options. 

d. Left-click on the Hyperlink option.

2. Setting up the linked file

a. When the Insert hyperlink window opens, browse the path of the file you want to link with the previous text.

b. Highlight the selected file by left-clicking to it and pressing the OK button to select

3. Checking the hyperlink

a. Upon setting up the hyperlink, the selected text will change color and will be underlined. 

b. To follow the hyperlink, hover the cursor on the hyperlinked text. Then hold the ctrl button in the keyboard and left-click the hyperlink

4. Editing the hyperlink

a. If you want to update the link, right-click on the linked text, and then select the Edit Hyperlink from the pop-up box. 

b. The same window will appear and you can readily edit the destination of the link.

fi. Link with external Web Sites.

a. In the left part of the Edit Link window, click Browsed Pages. 

b. Select the Web site that you want to insert as a link.

B. Hyperlinking in Presentations

1. Create your file to be hyperlinked

a. Start by writing your texts in the presentation.

b. Highlight the word that you are targeting to set up a link.

c. Then right-click on the highlighted link to open the options pop-up box.

d. Left-click on the Hyperlink option.

2. Setting up the page

a. When the Insert Hyperlink window opens, click Place in This Document. 

b. Highlighted the slide title or slide number and press OK.