What is the Internet and how can we use it?

This term in year 2, we are finding out a bit more about the Internet and how it can be used to help us in school.

First of all, Mrs Bryant asked:  "What is the Internet?"  We came up with some great ideas about what sort of things we can find on the Internet but we needed a bit more help to understand what it actually was.  We watched this clip to help us:

BBC Bitesize - What is the Internet?

We talked a bit more about how the Internet can be used to communicate with people all around the world, but also how it can be used to find information.  We thought about what a search engine was.  Only a few of us had heard these words before, but we all knew what Google was!  Now we know that Google is a search engine and we can use it to find the information that we want.

Mrs Bryant then asked us: "Is everything you read on the Internet fact or real?"

Straight away, we knew that it wasn't.  Firstly, we had already talked about e-safety and know that people can sometimes pretend to be someone else in order to trick you.  Secondly, Mrs. Bryant explained that anyone can make a website and put information on it.

After that, we talked about how we might use a search engine to find the information.  We looked at the wording that we would have to use and how we might need to be really specific with our searches to find what would be suitable for us in year 2.

After lunch, we had the chance to have a go at finding some facts about space using Google.  Some of us didn't find the information we wanted and so we had to change the words in the search.

In our next computing session, we will use this information to create our own fact posters.