Learn
to Search and teach
your LEARNERS to search!
Learning to search provides teachers access to the vast amount of information available on the Internet. Teachers may also wish to have students who have a demonstrated expertise with the Internet collect the information. To begin your search:
Select a search engine:
- If you are teaching young students to search, try a filtered search
engine such as: Yahooligans
(http://www.yahooligans.com/) or Searchopolis
(http://www.searchopolis.com/).
- For older learners, Google (http://www.google.com/), AltaVista (http://www.altavista.com/), and Dogpile (http://www.dogpile.com) are all popular and good.
Practice the search for information: You may try to find a variety of information. A practice worksheet may be a enjoyable:
- Where was Millard Fillmore born?
- Print or show me a recipe for chocolate chip cookies.
- Locate a picture of Monticello. Print or show me.
- Where is 06712?
Before introducing Internet projects to students, the teacher must introduce search engines. To familiarize students with search engines, the teacher may give each student a sample form and ask them to narrow their search by adding terms. Common techniques that students should be familiar with are:
- plus (+): placed before the key word, it includes terms in your search topic
- minus (-): placed before the keyword, it excludes terms (Inventors -automobiles)
- Asterisk (*): placed after word, it acts like a wildcard (Invent*)
- quotation marks (""): placed around a phrase, the search will match results in that exact sequence ("characteristics of inventors").
- (t:) placed before the keyword, it restricts search to document titles (t: Thomas Edison)
- u: placed before the keyword, it restricts search to document URLs only (u: AltaVista)
- Image: requests picture images having a specific filename. Use image:thomas edison to find pages with images called Thomas Edison.
By using the above tips, searching the millions of webpages currently available today becomes far less frustrating and far more productive! And isn’t that what we’re about?