Morten Oddvik

Understanding Search

Saturday, April 10, 2010 2:00:34 PM

digital kompetanse, search, lesson plans, skills

The Internet can be a complex and spiderweb-like place to find relevant and reliable information.

Searching for information becomes increasingly an omnipresent activity for students and teachers alike. But how much do we actually know about how search functions? When I asked my students about what search engines they use they all laughed a bit and said "Google, of course..." They did know about other search engines like Kvasir, Bing and Yahoo, but they didn't use them as Google "is better". They added that sometimes they go directly to Wikipedia for search as well. A colleague of mine said that in his experience only 1/10 of students use the Internet for other things than consuming information. Considering this, isn't search a skill on par with a reading strategy?

undertake information searches, create, store and retrieve texts using digital tools/find source material for his or her own tasks in the library or on the internet

Knowledge Promotion LK06, Norwegian Subject Curriculum[/ALIGN]

Interestingly, Google themselves have taken the matter into their own hands by creating lesson plans where search is the topic. The step-by-step Web Search Lesson Plans include presentations, printable hand-outs, online exercises and informative videos where Google employees explain the way search works.

Skillful searches are essential for 21st century learning and information literacy. With abundant information at our fingertips it is important to teach and reinforce literate searching.In this beginning search lesson students will take a look at search engines. By challenging students to understand the basics of search and how to understand results they'll learn how they can "drive" a search engine to deliver the results they need. Screen shot of one of the presentations provided on search.

Web Search Lesson Plans[/ALIGN]

Matt Cutts explaines "Snippets" in Google Search results.[/ALIGN]

Would you use these lesson plans, or would you have second thoughts about using a commercial supplier of information like Google?

Other good search engines:
Bing - Microsoft's Google competitor, beautiful and in many ways better search results, particularly photos and videos
Wolfram Alpha - Mathematical and scientific search using complex formulas for better results
Yahoo Search
Ask
Kvasir - Norwegian search engine

Do you know any other or better?

Brainstorming Hypertextuality and LiteracyNye Google Dokumenter

Comments

Liesbeth Meulemansmeulemansliesbeth # Sunday, April 11, 2010 8:07:58 AM

I'm usually a fan of instructional videoclips, but Matt Cutts's on snippets is rather difficult to understand, using words like 'crawl' and 'open directory'. I think that makes it too advanced for lower secondary school. Yet, some of the terms should absolutely be introduced at an early stage, like 'browser' and 'URL'. At our school this, as well as working with search engines, is taught in 5th grade.

Of course we have to re-introduce these terms in later grades, spiral teaching eh

Morten OddvikMorteno # Sunday, April 11, 2010 8:14:24 PM

I agree Liesbeth with your assessment of the video clip. I haven't watched them all, but I guess you could use parts of it, but how technical do we want our students to be? However, I think it's important for our students to realise that there are many search engines available, and a minimum knowledge on how they work is important.

It's great to hear that you teach them about browsers and URL in fifht grade, I'm not sure whether that's commonplace in all schools?

My experience is that we tend to take searching for a skills that all children are familiar with. True or untrue?

Anita NormannAnitanormann # Sunday, April 11, 2010 8:56:34 PM

I think you are right, Morten. We take this for granted these days, though I am not sure whether they specifically teach it in primary school or not...

I actually think it must be more than 6 years since I last had a workshop teaching my low.sec.students how to do a search on the internet.

Liesbeth Meulemansmeulemansliesbeth # Wednesday, April 14, 2010 1:49:41 PM

Too bad that each school operates within their own IT-plan... Standardisation would be helpful!