Inquiry

Why do teachers use Wikipedia to find information, but many don't let their students use it?  Teachers should spend less time worrying about how unreliable Wikipedia is and more time teaching students how to effectively search for, synthesize, and organize information they find on the Internet.  The Information Age Inquiry site has many models teachers can use to help their students master the elements of information inquiry.  One that is particularly detailed is the 8Ws of Information Inquiry by Annette Lamb.  The authors of the site maintain, "A inquiry or project-based learning environment involves wondering about a topic, wiggling through information, and weaving elements together. Each student learns and expresses themselves in a unique way."  The 8Ws gives an excellent road map for inquiry.
We are all experts at using the Internet and Wikipedia.  Let's apprentice our students to us as Boolean searchers.  Boolify allows students to see a visual representation of how their search terms narrow or expand the results they receive.  Keeping with the visual theme, Spezify will give students results that are not just text based and can lead them to multimedia quickly. 
After students have narrowed their results a bit, we need to teach students how to evaluate Internet information. 
Once they have some reliable sources, they can begin their collection of information.  Zoho offers a notebook tool in their suite where students can write, collect, and organize their notes.  They can then access their work anytime anywhere.  Another option is to use Think Tank to generate a topic and subtopics and then export that to Notestar to take notes and generate a bibliography.

Finally, when students are ready to publish their project, a tool like Citation Machine can really save some time and help students learn how to accurately list their references.