Google Search

Last week I began working with the 4th graders on search engines and searching skills, using various lessons from the Google in Education Classroom Tools and Google Search Education websites.  Last year I found the "Start Your Engines" presentation, which introduces terms that I want my students to know and having in common, such as "browser," "search engine" and "query," as well as the video with Matt Cutts which explains briefly how Google indexes webpages and ranks search results.

After that introduction, I taught a short piece of the Beginner lesson on the Search Education website about "Picking the right search terms."  It is difficult to fit in a whole lesson in about 30 minutes, while still allowing for book checkout at the end of library, but we do what we can in each class.  I have the laptop carts reserved, so each student has a MacBook at their fingertips to do hands-on searching and gain experience.

This week I had students work in small groups while we discussed choosing keywords and how to turn a question into a query.  Too often I see students typing entire questions into a search engine, and then getting results which are difficult to weed through to find one that answers the question.  We simplified some questions, then I gave them a few to work through in their groups.  They worked together to do searches, trying different combinations of words, then reporting back about the search.  They focus so much on finding the answer, and sometimes finding the wrong answer, that we need to take a step back to look at the keywords we are using and adjusting until we get a good collection of results before we look for the specific answer to the question.

We will do more practice with selecting good search terms this week.  I was planning to use past questions from the Google a Day website, which gives a search question of the day, but found that it has changed format recently, which makes it less useful for me.  I have specific days bookmarked as good search questions for elementary students, not too complex, not requiring certain background knowledge or alternate query terms, but I can't seem to get to specific days in the Google a Day website any more.  I will spend time trying to do this over the weekend, but it's disappointing.  I found being able to go back to previous days' questions an invaluable teaching tool.  Now it appears to be more of a game and less about a teaching tool.  I'll report back next week after I have had time to play with it.