22 | March | 2011 | Life is not a race to be first finished

A couple of weeks ago Tony Ryan spent some afternoons with us and encouraged us to invest some time in learning how to search the internet efficiently to save time in the long run. To support our Lead Teachers I made this resource that started its life as a Google Doc….. No point printing it out because then none of the links will work!!!!!

and other good ways to search the web

A lot of these ideas have come from this 100+ Google help page.

http://www.eternalcode.com/100-google-tricks-that-will-save-you-time-in-school

1. First of all we looked at some good tips for searching with Google

1.1 Alter the kind of search that Google does by changing your default to ‘safe search’.

1.2 Put speech marks around words if you want an exact match; eg when you Google Allanah King you get 5,360,000 hits. When you Google “Allanah King” you get 4,710 hits.

1.3 If you want page results from New Zealand make sure you select them from the left hand tool bar.

1.4 Use Google Advanced Search to search for a particular file format like a pdf or a ppt.

1.5 Use Wonderwheel to help clarify your search and refine with keywords and concepts.

1.6 Use Timeline to find out the timeline of when things happened through the decades – or to find articles from a particular month.

1.7 Use Google Squared to find out facts and figures about sets of things like ‘planets’.

1.8 Make sure Google Instant is on so that you Google can help you search intuitively and quickly. Use the arrow keys to skim down the search results and Enter to select. You can select Instant On in you Google search preferences.

1.9 To get results from a particular source enter Japan tsunami site:cnn.com will return pages about the Japanese tsunami but only from CNN news sources. Works with country codes as well eg earthquakes site:nz will give you NZ earthquake sites.

1.10 Some common search queries are as a screen grab below

2. Then we will look at some other great search engines

2.1 A great search engine is Delicious. You can choose whose online bookmarks you search through- these, yours, your networks or the look for the tags. A lot of the filtering has been done for you.

http://www.delicious.com/AllanahK

2.2 Google You Tube Search Engine http://www.youtube.com/

Use the Search Options to refine your search

http://www.theonion.com/video/youtube-contest-challenges-users-to-make-a-good-vi,14288/

2.3 One of my favourites is Qwiki– it cleverly reads you the search query with visuals to support it. Here is my blog post about it.

2.4 Another interesting one is Twurdy which attempts to give you an idea of the reading level of the search results. Great for a primary school.

You can also do a similar thing inside Advanced Search.

2.5 The next a visual Boolean Search engine, Boolify, that would help children understand the concept of Boolean Searches.

Here is Andrew Churches handout on Boolean searches that might help clarify how Boolean searches work.

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/879523/Public%20Link%20Learning%20Cluster/boolean.pdf

2.6 Next is QuinturaForKids– a search engine aimed at kids. It gives a word cloud which would help children refine their searches.

2.7 The next is Wolfram Alpha where you can find out all sorts of mathematical and data facts.

2.8 Very oddly is Spezify which searches for things in a text and pictorial sort of way. Try it to check out your own digital footprint. Here I tried it on my own name and came up with a heap of results from recently and way back.

2.9 Twitter searches http://twitter.com/

2.10 And lastly for the moment are some image search engines that you search for creative commons images that are free for you to us rather than stealing other people’s work from Google Images.

2.10.1- Pics4Learning http://www.pics4learning.com/