SearchSmarter

Yesterday, one of my staff invited me in to talk to her junior Honors United States History II students about how to be more efficient and effective with their internet searching, and with their time in front of a computer screen in general. To begin the discussion, I showed them this quick clip:

I wanted to help them see that there are other options than Google and Wikipedia, but also how to work within those two frequent web destinations for students. Among the alternates to Google I showed them was something called Sweet Search. This site uses a system of web guides around various topics to help students narrow the web to the areas they need instead of searching the entire web. They have guides on everything from Family Travel to High School Geometry. Additionally, we looked at some history specific sites like George Mason University’s Center for History and New Media, the State Department’s Background Notes, University of Houston’s Digital History, and news aggregators like 10×10.

Googling

However, as great as some of the students thought these sites were, the techniques we use to find information once there, and then determine the credibility of that information are most important. We discussed some basic tips on how to streamline and focus your search so that the likelihood that relevant results appear is increased. We used these two guides:

By using limiters like putting search phrases in “quotes,” or limiting results only to .edu sites (site:edu “search term”) students began to see that the results they got were of high quality than just regular searching.

Wikipedia

We also showed them some of the guiding principles behind Wikipedia. As a resource, Wikipedia has often been vilified by educators at both the university and high school level because of the supposed unreliability of the information. Because of how search engines work, the links into and out of a Wikipedia entry cause it to be at or near the top of a typical Google search. What I tried to stress with the students was the value of Wikipedia stems from the basic rule of editing an entry: you have to validate your information with credible sources, and then list those sources at the bottom of the entry. By beginning with the “works cited” list in a Wikipedia entry, you gain access to a pre-made bibliography to begin your research on a particular topic. Don’t end your research with Wikipedia, start there.

Evaluating Research

While we didn’t have time to dive deeply into how to interrogate the web to figure out if information is credible, we did explore a few sites that help decipher which media outlet is telling the truth. Factcheck.org, and Politifact.org offer some compelling research into what Congress, the mainstream media, and even some celebrity pundits claim. By checking in on those sites and attempting verify claims, students can begin to build a better radar when it comes to the verity of a source.

Eliminating Distractions

One element that students often claim gets in their way is the amount of distractions they have in their lives in the way of social media–things like Facebook, Twitter, SMS, or BBM. Even adults are beginning to see how distracted these elements of our lives can cause us to be. To combat it, I showed the students how to use browser plug-ins like Readability to strip the extra content like ads and videos from a page they are reading on the internet. We also looked at things like quietube and Turn the Lights Out to eliminate distractions while they watch video on their computers. I also referenced this article, which has helped me reclaim my attention span.

Advertisement

2 thoughts on “SearchSmarter

  1. Patrick this post was excellent!I really think you must have been a librarian in a former life! Have you used easywhois.com or whois.com to verify who is responsible for a website. You may enjoy using these sites to gather more information.
    Another site is the wayback machine. Lots of fun and very interesting to see how a site has changed over the years. Some great ideas for discussion can be generated when looking at when a site was changed and discussing why that change might have occurred.
    Thanks again for a great post!

    1. Thanks! I don’t know that I was an LMS in a past-life, but I do know that when you find a great one, it can make all the difference in the world.

      I have used both of the domain search tools you mentioned, but haven’t really had the chance to play with them with students yet, and I personally love the wayback machine and archive.org.

      Thanks for commenting!

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out /  Change )

Twitter picture

You are commenting using your Twitter account. Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out /  Change )

Connecting to %s
https://chalkdust101.wordpress.com/2011/03/08/1561/
chalkdust101.wordpress.com
CC-MAIN-2023-06
112846
application/http; msgtype=response
sha1:YG6FJ56K62VBIYYRQQKJ7M5WX7PZSYTY
<urn:uuid:51cdb5e5-059a-4789-9781-a5b157cfff2a>
2023-02-09T02:15:20Z
192.0.78.13
text/html
sha1:QJTZDK4VTW5OEODZEOTUFAC7MTAL7DXJ
<urn:uuid:a06beda2-fb5b-4972-96f2-1ba2de4ff7df>
https://chalkdust101.wordpress.com/2011/03/08/1561/
response
<urn:uuid:c9d20637-086d-444e-b9fd-21f7ab0ec9b0>
isPartOf: CC-MAIN-2023-06
publisher: Common Crawl
description: Wide crawl of the web for January/February 2023
operator: Common Crawl Admin (info@commoncrawl.org)
hostname: ip-10-67-67-83
software: Apache Nutch 1.19 (modified, https://github.com/commoncrawl/nutch/)
robots: checked via crawler-commons 1.4-SNAPSHOT (https://github.com/crawler-commons/crawler-commons)
format: WARC File Format 1.1
conformsTo: https://iipc.github.io/warc-specifications/specifications/warc-format/warc-1.1/