Google Search Education - teach your students to search better

Google Search Education is another great educational resource from Google. The site has lesson plans and even live training to help students, and teachers, learn how to search for academic sources, as well as develop critical and independent thinking skills. Students will be able to become skilled searchers and be able to analyze and critique the search results.

The lesson plans are a great resource for teachers to use in their classroom to help their students search better. The live training sessions are also archived so that you can watch them at any time.

Effective internet searching is a critical skill for our students to have.

Related:

10 Tech Skills Every Student Should Have

Google for Education Resources - tips, apps, how-to's, getting started, lesson ideas, and more

10 Important Skills Students need for the Future

Tips for More Effective Google Searches

ZDNET has a great article with 10 Google Search Secrets that can help you and your students search more effectively and efficiently.

Knowing how to do effective internet searches is a very important skill for all of us to have, so share these resources with your students and help them learn this valuable skill.

Google - free posters with search tips for teachers

Google for Educators - Resources for using Google in school

Tips on better searches on Google, from Google

Infographic on better searches using Google

10 Tech Skills Every Student Should Have

Filamentality - search, find and organize learning resources

Filamentality is a free web tool that lets you pick a topic, search for resources online, gather the resources together and then turn them into online learning activities. 

You can use it just for organizing web research or you can use it to create a web-based activity that your students can complete as an activity or assessment. 

It's free, easy to use, and the help and support are excellent. 

Check it out and create a cool online activity now. 

Tips on better searches on Google, from Google

I just posted a nice infographic on better searches on Google, but Google has some great resources on better searches too.

Google's Educator Resource page has 8 free, downloadable posters, for educators that have tips and idea for doing better searches, including web search, book search, scholar, quiz, Earth, and for kids.

These are great resources to share with your students.

Google for Educators Resources.

Factbites: Where results make sense

Factbites is a new way to search the internet. It is described as "what happens when you combine a search engine with an encyclopedia".

It is definitely a different way to search for information. Instead of listing a bunch of web sites that have your search terms in them, it lists sentences and paragraphs from sites that are related to your search. The search results are also grouped by sites and related topics. Many of the sentences and paragraphs are a definition to your search term. This can be useful for just needing to quickly look something up.

There were some quirks to it. I typed in "electron" as a search and it changed the search to "electronics." When I searched for "Twitter" it had no results at all.

Here is a screenshot for a search for "pedagogy". You can see how the results are much different than a Google search. (Bing is blocked here at school because inappropriate content can be seen on the search results page of Bing, even if the referring site is blocked. This includes porn videos that will play in the search results page!)

I think that this is a good addition to different search engines and can be used to look up a definition or other information. It is still in Beta so it is not fully refined yet.

You could also use it to teach students about search engines and different ways to find information online.

Check those rumors

Snopes is a great site that confirms or debunks many of the internet and email stories out there.

This is a great site to use to confirm that email you got the other day about a Pepsi driver, or about Microsoft giving away money if you forward that email. They also have information on my web hoaxes and bad web sites. They do a great job researching the rumor or email and post the evidence they have confirming or denying the rumor.

Use it with your students to show them how not everything on the internet or email is true.

Bing - Microsoft's New Search site

Microsoft has launched a new search site, Bing. This site is different than Windows Live, Google, and Yahoo, in how it presents search results.

When searching the internet, the results are displayed not based on relevance to the search term like the others, but based on how popular a site it is. Some early reviews and comments show a split among people, with some liking it and some hating it. Like anything else, it is personal preference.

The layout is similar to other search results, but you can click on an icon to the right of the result and see the first parts of that site.

In image search, you only get the images themselves in the results. However, hovering over an image brings up more details, like the source web page. This allows for a clean appearance, but I like Google's way of showing the source site because I use that as a guide for evaluating the image.

Video search will play a thumbnail view of the video in the search page when you hover your mouse over the thumbnail. There is a problem here though. If a user changes the filtering settings for Bing they can see ANY video in the thumbnail, even if there is a filter on the system that they are using. This means that a student could search for videos and watch them in thumbnail version, even if the source site is blocked by the school's filter system, so teachers beware.

Overall, Bing is a nice, different way of searching the internet. I suggest that people should try it out with the same search that they do on their normal search engine and see which they personally prefer, or which one gives them the best search results for them.