Planning your work
What is required?
What do you need to produce?
Who is your audience?
Is there anything you have to include? Maps, diagrams, illustrations?
When do you have to hand your work in?
If you need help with a particular type of project, try Poster tutorial, Booklet tutorial, Spoken presentation tutorial, Powerpoint on Powerpoint
What do you already know about your topic?
- Think about what you need to find out.
- Brainstorm some ideas
- Produce a plan. The plan can be in the form of a list, or a mind map or a table, whatever suits you.
If you are not sure how to do this, use this planning tutorial .
Below is an example of a research plan as a mind map produced by Inspiration, available in the Library.
If you need help with Inspiration, use this Inspiration tutorial.
If you are not able to access Inspiration then you could use bubbl.us or Readwritethink to produce a min-map and plan.
If you prefer you could use a KWHL sheet to sort out what you know and what you need to find out.
Define your topic
Use a dictionary in the Reference Library or go to OneLook to check the definition of your topic.
Use the research planner to note your definition, keywords and key questions.
Useful keywords
Use your plan to get useful keywords which you can use as search terms when you come to locate your sources. Keywords are the words you tell the search engine to look for.
| Possibles | Unhelpful |
|---|---|
| wind | damage |
| environment | sites |
| energy | lobby |
| electricity | clean |
| "wind generators" | friendly |
| wind turbines | farms |
| windmills | mills |
Watch out for:
- words that can mean more than one thing
- words that are so common that they are useless.
Aim to be as specific as possible.
Good questions
If you need help to think of questions, use this questions tutorial.
Use your mindmap to produce some good questions about your topic. You can't go wrong if you ask yourself :-
Remember!
Who for?
-
When by?
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What format? poster, PowerPoint, essay, talk etc.
-
Anything special you must include? Charts, graphs, maps, diagrams, illustration etc.
Make sure you know what your teacher is expecting of you.
Try the Planning quiz , then move on to locating your information.