Sunday, May 25, 2008

Frustrated By Online Searches!

The "Four Nets for Better Searching Web Lesson" offers a way for you and your students to overcome hassles with doing online searches. Here is a lesson to help students hone their online research searching skills by using Google Advanced Search and other tricks. A 4-step process for students to learn how to search online effectively is offered in the lesson plan. Check it out, and let us know what you think. If students are taught successful skills for online searching, they will save lots of time and reduce frustration. Do you think this lesson with its accompanying resources will achieve that aim? Did you learn anything new by reviewing the tips offered in the Four Nets lesson? Post your comments and responses.
Image is from the fourents page, using the above URL.

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

Using NETS is a great way to help find what you are looking for on the Internet. I have used some to the advanced search options such as narrowing the phrases to find what I am looking for. I did not know how to use the exact phrase option until reading this article. Another aspect of advanced searching I have always wondered about is how to find similar pages on a topic. I wish I knew that it was as easy as typing in "similar to" or "linked to". I look foraward to giving this a try the next time I am searching for information.

I think NETS would help teachers as well as students become better researchers. I plan to explain these tools to my students the next time I have a chance. Students spend too much time on computers trying to find what you are looking for and end up never finding it or finding information that is not accurate. Using this method will really improve their skills.

Anonymous said...

I use google constantly as my searching tool and it is frusterating when you are looking for something and are unable to find exactly what you need. By reading through the NETS way to search it helped me as a teacher to undertand what to do to help myself. I think that this would be very useful to teach the children, and it is also very easy to understand and to use.
After I was done reading the article I went and tried it with google and it did make a difference. I always think about such small tools that you learn along the way that makes tasks so much easier. For example last semester I wrote numerous papers and if I would have known how to search properly I think that I would have found my data quicker. Same thing goes for kids, giving them as many resources as possible is truely key especially when working with technology.

Anonymous said...

I think this website is incredibly useful for teachers. The internet is generally the primary research tool that students use first and sometimes the only research tool. It is so important to find ways to help students be more discriminatory about their findings. I have saved this link to my favorites because it provides great insight into the various ways that one can varify a websites quality.

I too learned a lot from this post. Thanks Judy.

Anonymous said...

I am constantly searching the internet for this or that and have found that less is more but this site really helps spell out the need to be exact in what you are looking for unless you want to wade through hours of useless data. This would be a great lesson to teach before letting the students go out to get research for a project. This would also be a great thing to teach some of the teachers who spend hours looking for that one thing they know that they saw, one more word on this subject, if you find it, book mark it. How many times do you find the perfect site to go back and search hours of history to find it again.

Anonymous said...

I agree that this is good information to share with students. During student teaching I taught students to use quotation marks around the terms they were googling to get a return with those exact words.

The problem that we encountered was that the middle school students were researching scientific topics, but then would reach websites far beyond their reading level. I tried to steer students toward sites like kidshealth.org, but all of the information they needed was on more advanced sites. I know that there is no way to avoid this. I just wanted to share my frustration.

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