AustLit

Discover ways of using AustLit in the classroom for teaching and study.

AustLit provides an opportunity for teachers and students to develop digital literacy skills and database competency through learning to search and navigate our complex search forms. 

Teachers can use the rich information available to stimulate students' discovery, writing, and presentation skills. And secondary students will develop skills that will aid them tertiary study.

The temptation of Google is such that students often assume that they only need to google a search term to find all available information on it. Not only does this mean they miss access to a wide range of resources, it also means they don't always have the awareness of or facility to use the more complicated databases that they need at university or in the workforce.

These exercises are designed to help students use the AustLit database to return specific, targeted results. Although the lesson outlines can be used selectively or out of order, they encourage progressively more sophisticated uses of the database, beginning with lesson one, which draws primarily from a single biography, and building to lesson four, which benefits from building complex searches.

Access the exercises via the menu on the left or download as a PDF.

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