Welcome to the forum.

Not sure there's any such thing as a 'dumb question' - we all had to start somewhere - but there is such a thing as a 'dumb answer'. However you won't get dumb answers from members of this forum.

For shooting partial panos - panos with less than 360x180 degrees FOV - you can just use a tripod IF there's nothing in the scene closer than about 100m.

Otherwise you require a special pano head which mounts on the tripod. This positions the camera/lens at the so-called NPP (No Parallax Point) to avoid parallax issues between neighbouring images which will otherwise make it impossible to get an accurate stitch.

Nodal Ninja pano heads are popular:
http://www.nodalninja.com

You can also get fully automatic robotic pano heads - such as this low cost system developed by members of this forum:
http://www.autopano.net/wiki/action/vie … king_mount

http://www.autopano.net/forum/p32070-20 … -37#p32070

You can shoot panos with any lens - the longer the focal length the more images you need to cover any particular Field of View (FOV). An automatic robotic head is particularly useful when shooting with long focal length lenses.

Most people use fisheye lenses to shoot 360x180 FOV panos destined for display on-line because you require many fewer images to cover the scene using a fisheye lens. The Sigma 8mm f3.5 FE and the Tokina 10-17mm zoom FE are popular choices for Canon cropped- sensor DSLRs like your XSi.

For partial panos destined for large hi-res prints people tend to use longer focal length standard/rectilinear lenses.

When shooting panos use full manual camera settings - aperture, focus, shutter speed and white balance - for best results, keeping the settings the same for every image in the pano set.