Search Habits

Why

Too often teachers give students an assignment to research a particular topic, yet do little or no pre-teaching with regard to research strategies. Students often land on Wikipedia or an answers site and venture no further. They may have trouble with the reading level of a site or fail to evaluate the reliability of information on the site. The tips below, based on the Power Searching with Google MOOC, will help you and your students search more effectively.

Goal:

To utilize strategies including: keywords, search operators, site evaluations, and search relevance to enhance search results.

Diigo Practice

Do:
• Use specific keywords for searches
• Use search operators to refine searches
• Limit searches to .edu or .gov for sources with
greater reliability

Don't

• Avoid asking questions (you'll just get answer sites)

• Click on the first search option without checking the summary (there may be a better site down the list)

Try this

1. Search for "Chia Pet Experiments"

1b. Now search for "Chia Pet Experiments -chromatin"

2. Search "Global Warming"

2b. Search "Global Warming kids site:gov"

Agenda

1. Habits Survey

2. Search Tips and Practice

3. Build a research lesson for your age group