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Want to know the truth about student research projects these days? Chances are that your child will have no trouble finding good sites no matter what topic they pick. The real issue is often that these sites contain much more information than can be used in a student report. At this point in the research process, when many relevant sites have been found, it seems logical to kids to print out entire Web sites. That's not a good idea. So how can you get them to hold off from pressing Print and wasting paper and expensive ink?

It's time to put some literacy and computer skills into action. Direct your child to skim the material on the sites to see what fits and then go back and read over the parts that seem promising. (With younger kids you may have to help them do this with a first research paper, but they will quickly get the hang of it.) Kids need to think of themselves as journalists gathering background material for a story and try to find sites full of facts and other details.

Also at this point kids should search through the picture and other media options to see if anything looks worthwhile. As they do this, they should be cutting and pasting and adding ideas to their outline. (More on how to do that below.)

Suggest to your child that the best pages they find should be added to Bookmarks or Favorites in their browser in case they need to go back and check on some of the information. They also might want to start a word processing page where they can cut and paste URLs (web addresses) so they can link to them later. (This can be a real time saver and quite valuable if they forget to add a site to their bibliography.)

Not everything your kids need for their report will or can be found online. But they can remain paperless even in a library full of books. If your child is doing their work on a laptop, they can just continue wherever they are. However, if their report is on the desktop of a desktop computer, remember that books can also be checked out of the school or local library and brought to a computer so the same kind of note taking process can occur.

Taking Electronic Notes

After organization the next most important skill your child needs to acquire is how to take electronic notes. Depending on the experience and skills level of your child and before they even start the paperless project, you might practice taking electronic notes with them by giving them some sample articles to read on the computer screen. An encyclopedia entry on a famous person, place or thing, an article out of a online newspaper, or a sample web site to peruse are all good choices for this exercise. While your child is reading the articles on the computer, ask them to toggle to and fill in a set of open-ended questions on an open word processing page about what they've read by cutting and pasting in answers. Some sample questions might include the ten most important facts out of the encyclopedia article: the who, what, where, when and how from the newspaper article and if any opinion on the subject was included; and the five most important points the web site made about the subject and if it promoted any particular point of view on the topic. With this kind of practice, they will be ready to add to those empty folders they created when they first got their "paperless" paper organized and download exactly what they want from the Internet to their computer.

At this point your child should also open another working folder with a blank word processing document where they can start their bibliography. Here they can copy and paste - no typing allowed!- the URLs (web addresses) they visit and use for note taking. Remind them to record the date they visited the site, because the Web is an ever-changing body of knowledge. They should also add whatever other references they use - books, emails, and magazines - as they finish with them. That way their bibliography will be a breeze to put together at the end of the project.

Capturing Text and Images

Here's a quick review of the mechanics of how to capture text and images for you and your students:

To capture all the text from a Web page, simply save the page to the appropriate folders. Follow these directions:

1. Choose Save As from the File menu.
2. Choose Plain text (Explorer) or Text (Netscape) from the pop-up menu.
3. Navigate to the folders you set up earlier.
4. Enter an appropriate filename.
5. Click the Save button.

NOTE: See below for copying only parts of the text on a web page.

To capture images from Web pages, simply download them to the appropriate folder on your computer. Follow these instructions:

1. Place the cursor directly over the picture.
2. Click and hold down the mouse button (right click on Windows), until a pop-up menu appears.
3. Choose Download image to disk (Explorer) or Save image to disk (Netscape) from the pop-up menu. Downloading to disk means saving it to your hard drive. You can save it to a floppy disk or Zip disk instead, if you wish.
4. Navigate to the appropriate folder you set up earlier.
5. Enter an appropriate filename.
6. Click the Save button.

Saving Entire Pages

Both images and text can be cut and pasted from Web sites on the Internet using the method described above. With some computers you can also save an entire web page, including both text and images. If you're using Internet Explorer on a Macintosh computer, you can save a Web Archive by choosing Save As... from the File menu, and then choosing Web Archive from the pop-up menu.

If you're using Explorer on Windows, you can do the same thing by choosing Save As... from the File menu, and then choosing Web Page complete from the pop-up menu. Either way, you'll find that the entire web page is saved to your disk.

Saving Notes

If you don't need the entire web page or even all the text on a page, you can copy the text you want by selecting it on your computer screen. Once it's selected, go to the Edit Menu and select Copy. Open a word-processing document where you can paste what you copied. If the note is a quote, put quotation marks around it. Don't forget that besides the note, you'll want to save information about where you got the note. This means the URL (or web address) at the very least, and if you can find them, the author and date. Save the information into the appropriate folder.

Saving Inspirations, Random Thoughts, Insights, Revelations, Ideas and More

You can save your own ideas into the proper or designated folders in much the same way. Open a word-processing document, write your ideas, and save into the appropriate folder.

What's next? Making sure all the sources are cited correctly!