4.+Navigating+Within+a+Website

 Please keep the following Important Questions in mind while reading this page: //1. How effective are your students at reading online? How do you know? // //2. Do you feel comfortable decoding websites? //

There is nothing more frustrating to our young pirates than not being able to read their maps and decode all the symbols and icons on their way to finding their treasure! Website and webpage navigation is an overlooked skill by many teachers. We often assume that by the time our students are ready for serious online research that they have already acquired the skills of reading a webpage and knowing how to maneuver around a website. Unfortunately this is not the case and many of our students are lost before they even really began. The research is out there! [|Jakob Nielsen]conducted a series of experiments in 2006 that tracked the eye movement of online readers. The evidence points to an F- shaped pattern that appears in a heatmap showing how our eyes track information on a webpage; across the heading, down the left hand column and then horizontally across in the middle of the page. In essence, Nielsen claims that F really stands for “fast”, as online readers are quickly looking for the information they seek and if they don’t find it soon enough they are off clicking to another page. According to a study done by Sutherland-Smith (2002) with a group of grade 6 students, students were using a "snatch and grab" technique of internet reading, feeling a need to be fast they would gather their resources for reading later rather than slowly reading what they had found as they would normally do with a book. Sadly, this is not new information for us as teachers watching our students flit from screen to screen and not slowing down long enough to digest or make meaning of anything they read online. For many of our students, they aren’t even aware of the various parts to a webpage and how to properly navigate all the elements that make a piece of digital text. “A natural part of previewing printed text is scanning for chapter titles, headings, diagrams, and boldface words. Previewing a Web site's home page can also give readers a sense of the structure and intended connections among concepts linked within the site” (Coiro, 2005). By drawing a comparison to the traditional formats of non-fiction comprehension strategies we have used in the past to the new format on the screen, students are better able to adapt and understand where they need to go to get the information they seek.

**Here is a lesson outline to begin teaching your students about the key elements of a website and how to navigate through a webpage to locate information effectively.** **Objective:**
 * To familiarize students with the various elements of a website.
 * To develop their website vocabulary.
 * To increase their comfort level and readability when accessing digital text on the internet.

**Activating prior knowledge:** **Acquiring new knowledge:**  3. To summarize what they had learned and review the parts of a webpage with a deeper thought process in mind, the following link to a "think-aloud" would solidify their understanding: []
 * 1) Begin with a KWL - What website terminology are students already familiar with?
 * 2)  Create an anchor chart to display on your classrooom wall. Provide a “screen capture” of a webpage and have students label the various parts of the webpage using a word splash of terms: address bar, scroll bar, back button, title, table of contents, hyperlinks, date, and author.
 * 1) After reviewing what the students know and “need” to learn about reading a webpage, the following activity which reviews and teaches the parts of a webpage would help in acquiring this basic information. This lesson would work beautifully on a SMARTboard!media type="custom" key="13286844"
 * 2) Along with this activity, the students could compare the formats of non-fiction print text to that of a web-based format as outlined in this lesson from Read, Write, Think: Comprehending non-fiction text on the web[[image:effectivelyreadingonline/comparison_table.jpg]]

<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; font-size: 110%;">**Applying new knowledge:**
 * 1) <span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; font-size: 110%;">Students would create a Voicethread where they are explaining the parts of the web and designing their own think-aloud using the writing tool on Voicethread and a screen image of a webpage.

Give it a try! Here is a website for students researching Ancient Egypt. Can you identify all the parts and navigational hotspots on this website? media type="custom" key="13509088"


 * <span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; font-size: 110%;">Assessment: **
 * 1) <span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; font-size: 110%;">Students could be //informally// assessed as they worked on research projects and the teacher made observations as they arrived at various websites.
 * 2) <span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; font-size: 110%;">A more //formal// assessment could be done if a teacher chose to create a sheet of questions and students would need to navigate around a website in order to be able to answer the given questions.

<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; font-size: 110%;">References

<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">Adams, A. (2009). Intro to the Internet-Parts of a Web Page [PowerPoint Slide]. Retrieved from <span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">[]

<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">Coiro, J. (2005). Making sense of online text. //Educational Leadership, 63//(2). Retrieved from []

<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">Nielsen, J. (2006). F-shaped pattern for reading web content. Retrieved from []

<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">Sutherland-Smith,W. (2002). Weaving the literacy web: Changes in reading from page to screen. //The Reading Teacher//, //55//(7), 662-669.