Learning to Search

I have always considered myself to be reasonably advanced in my ability to peruse the internet.  I have also enjoyed showing students how to do so when needed.  However, the concept of explicitly teaching students how to use things like search engines has never really occurred to me.  I have simply tried to build in opportunities to show students how, and only if I think they need help.  This week, Alan November (2008) convinced me that: “It is essential that we teach our children the discipline of making meaning from a very complex and constantly shifting global warehouse of information and communication” (p. 6).  Though all of our resources had good ideas, November did the best job of describing practical applications for our classrooms, and ourselves.

Though many of the techniques described in our resources were elementary, there were also many good suggestions.  Many of the search techniques I have already figured out, but the activities described for students would be great for showing them why we must be cautious when clicking on search results.  As I searched for three resources this week I attempted to employ several of the techniques described in our resources. 

For the project I am having students do, each student will be selecting their own organism to research its place within the levels of biological organization.  To make things interesting, I am not allowing any overlap of species, meaning that students will be researching more than 160 total species.  In order to aid them in this endeavor, I thought I would find several databases that they can use to select and begin their research.

I began my search on good old Google.  I decided to first employ basic Boolean operators as described in Eagleton & Dobler (2007, pp. 61-62). Working through various combinations of +’s and –‘s I eventually found a great animal database created by Sea World (http://www.seaworld.org/animal-info/animal-bytes/).  This I bookmarked using Diigo (www.Diigo.com) which I to be the most useful bookmarking program for me, even if it is not as good for sharing my sites with others.  I liked the ability to highlight and take notes as well as the quick features of the Diigolet Toolbar App.  I also like that I can add my own descriptions and tags for quick searching within My Library later.

Next, I tried to use November’s (2008) suggestion of searching “extensions” using Alta Vista’s (www.altavista.com) host: command.  My success was somewhat limited and may reflect a change in the search engines “host” feature over the years since the book was published.  About 80% of my search results had the correct host extensions (I was searching for .edu domains) but they also seemed to search for the word “host” literally.  When combined with the term “animal” this meant I got a lot of hits about parasites (which I do find interesting :-).   In the end, I decided to try removing  the command “Host” and try just searching “.edu” in a normal Boolean search.  This yielded several good sights, including one nugget called the Animal Diversity Web (http://animaldiversity.ummz.umich.edu/site/index.html).

To play devil’s advocate I decided to find my last one by just going to Google and typing a search like a student probably would.  I clicked the first link (like they would) and found another animal database (http://www.kidsbiology.com/animals-for-children.php?animal=Star-Nosed%20Mole) that is for younger kids and does not have all that detailed of information, but would work for brainstorming and as a launch point for further research.

In the end, I discovered several ways to refine my everyday searches.  More importantly, I have found some great resources, and reasons, to use in my own classrooms to get my students to be more advanced Web surfers.  I agree with all of the authors this week that these are skills that we must teach students before setting them free on the web. 

In Diigo, I created a public list of these three sites.  In order to do so, I had to install the Diigo toolbar (kind of annoying) but it would be good for me to use with students.  Here is the link: http://www.diigo.com/list/hiscitech/animal-databases

Resources:

Eagleton, M. B., & Dobler, E. (2007). Reading the web: Strategies for Internet inquiry. New York, NY: The Guilford Press.

November, A. (2008). Web literacy for educators. Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin Press.