Over breakfast yesterday I asked our boys if they had ever been shown how to use a search engine. I know that they use Google all the time, but wondered how much they knew about advanced search features, Boolean operators or even vertical search engines. Both answered that they had never been shown how to do a Web search nor had any of their teachers discussed how to use Wikipedia. I see them on Wikipedia for almost every homework assignment, so I’m sure that it’s more widely used than any other reference source.
Let’s face it, search engines aren’t that new. I was using Altavista in 1995 and now, 12 years later, our local teachers are not helping students understand these powerful tools. We are in an age of search and if schools don’t cover these tools, then who will? I know that I will tutor our boys but what about everyone else? Will mentioned this weekend that we need role models for social networking sites like MySpace and Facebook. We also need role models for digital information literacy.
Here is my question to the community at large – is there a suite of websites or especially videos that parents can use to help their children master the basic tools of the web? I’m thinking of the excellent Commoncraft videos on RSS, social bookmarks and wikis. Is there something similar for advanced search? So far I’ve found:
Google Advanced Search help page
Google WebSearch for Educators
… but no cool videos yet.
Wow, thanks, the last one seems extremely usefull. I’ll see if it helps for an oncomming project.
How about dictionary.com?
Harold, I have a few resources (Info lit is a passion of mine and I DID teach it to my students!):
http://21cif.imsa.edu/rkit/rkit_directory.html
http://informationfluency.wikispaces.com/
You also might be interested to know that we (LEARN and Concordia U) have finally obtained grant approval for a project to build web-based tools to teach high school students how to search and validate information.
Hope this helps!
Harold, a friend of mine is working with his wife on a website for people who home school their children. The website isn’t published yet, but will focus on listing and rating online and print resources for parents — to supplement the home learning programs. The reason I mention this info is that the home learning programs might be a great place to plant the seed of your concern. Maybe they already have something in the works that would fill this apparent gap?
Thanks for all the links and comments. At least Lucas is using these tools for his school work.
I am catching up on my Bloglines and thought you might still want to know about this –
http://www.googleguide.com/
Thanks, Joan, it looks like a great resource.
With Alta Vista learning about the boolean operators was important and helpful – it wasn’t a very smart search engine, and giving it lots of hints what you want was a great help.
With Google Advanced search – some brilliant person designed this page:
http://www.google.ca/advanced_search
and it just keeps getting better – The tips on that page are great, and tell you how to do all this stuff with the normal search box.
Even better – Google keeps amazing records – what people ask first, then what people ask second – they are learning what we mean.
Tailoring search strings isn’t about boolean operators anymore, and it is a moving target – it makes it hard to keep good resources up to date.
Thanks, Cam, but I’m still amazed that so few people use the advanced features of Google.