My friend David Warlick gave me a great tip about searching the Web. Instead of starting with a huge search engine such as Google, start small. Pick an engine with a smaller database, such as Yahoo, and work through its directory, which is arranged by subject and sub-topic.

Then, having identified one or two high-quality Web sites, go back and create a search phrase based on frequently found terms in the pages you've found. Now proceed to a big search engine and plug in these keywords for your search.

Focus is everything: Get the search terms right and you'll wind up with a much more useful list of results.

Warlick, a Raleigh-based consultant with an international reputation, knows all about key words because he has been preaching good search methods, and much else, to educators for more than a decade. His new book, "Redefining Literacy for the 21st Century" (Linworth, $44.95) presents a practical and perceptive view of where we're going.

We're moving into an era of digital literacy, with children growing up around electronic tools their parents only dreamed about. Warlick has seen how much effect the Internet is having on how students find information and use it in their classwork. A key component of his book lays out how to evaluate and organize Net resources.

After all, nobody edits the Internet, and finding what is reliable is a multistep process that calls for hands-on skills. Unfortunately, they are skills that many educators don't have time to acquire in an academic environment driven by lesson plans and standardized tests.

Consider mailing lists. The search tool Catalist (www.lsoft.com/lists/list_q.html) searches only for those discussion groups that use the Listserv software generally used by universities and research centers. The choice of search tool, then, is a way to restrict your hits to highly relevant targets. A teacher with the right mailing list can pose questions to genuine experts in their field.

And many mailing lists provide archives that are themselves searchable, which means you can work through discussions from authorities on the topic of your choice. We need to make sure teachers can identify such resources, and provide the training for them to master their use.

In the same way, once you've identified a useful Web site, you can use Google to narrow a search to that site alone. Try searching Google with the search term "Mars Rover" and you wind up with almost 400,000 hits. But if you know where the Jet Propulsion Laboratory's Web site is, you can restrict your search to it by adding "site:www.jpl.nasa.gov" to your original search terms. Now you'll get 98 precise, high-quality hits on your topic.

But searching is only part of the puzzle. Employing data in the classroom is an area where teachers need sound advice. Creating text reports enriched with spreadsheets and graphs teased out of online databases can be tricky. But these are all skills that digital literacy demands.

"Redefining Literacy" is packed with speculation, including a discussion of how class work can become collaborative that sounds remarkably like how open-source software is created. That's relevant to our copyright conundrum: We build cultural artifacts upon contributions from past work that cannot reach the public domain because of unrealistic intellectual property laws.

Teachers interested in "Redefining Literacy" should visit Warlick's Web site (www.landmark-project.com), where supporting information can be found. I no longer have school-age children, but if I did, I'd sleep easier knowing their teachers had access to the ideas in this book.