When Bard is Better Than Google
Yesterday I was in charge of making dinner for my family. My plan was to make fish tacos. I’ve made them before so I knew that I needed a lime. But I wasn’t sure of all of the other ingredients that I needed. So I did what anyone in my position would do, I Googled […]
Search Strategies Webinar Next Tuesday
Do you teach middle school or high school social studies classes? Have you ever had a student say to you, “Google has nothing on this” or “I can’t find any information about this?” If you answered “yes” to either of those questions, you’ll want to join me for next Tuesday’s webinar all about teaching search […]
How to Search Within Desktop and Mobile Pages
How to search within documents, web pages, and spreadsheets is one of the first things that I teach to students at the start of a new semester or new school year (for year-long courses). It’s a simple thing that can lead to more efficient use of time spent on research. Over the weekend a reader […]
A Helpful Sheet of Google Search Modifiers
A few days ago I highlighted five Google search products that students often overlook. While it is important for students to know about those tools, they first need to know some basics like how to modify their search terms to get different results. Years ago Vicki Davis tipped me off to a search modifiers poster published by […]
Try Using Vocabulary Lists to Help Your Students Conduct Better Searches
This is an excerpt from this week’s Practical Ed Tech Newsletter. I’m in the process of updating my Search Strategies Students Need to Know online course. In the process of doing so I revisited a good article that I read a few years ago. That article is Characterizing the Influence of Domain Expertise on Web Search […]
Two Search Refinement Tips for Every Teacher and Student
A couple of days ago I hosted a webinar for tech coaches. In the webinar I mentioned that teaching teachers just a couple of quick search refinement tips that they can pass on to students can help them stop feeling like their students are going to the same websites over and over. To that end, […]
How to Use Google Scholar to Find Federal and State Court Rulings
Earlier this week I wrote about and published a video about how to use Google Scholar to research inventions and their inventors. Case law research is a third aspect of Google Scholar that can be helpful to student researchers. The case law search function in Google Scholar enables you to find Federal and state cases […]
How to Use Google Scholar to Learn About Inventions and Inventors
Last week I published a blog post outlining five things that students should know about using Google Scholar. One of those things is the option to search for U.S. Patent Office filings. When you locate a patent filing through Google Scholar you can read the details of the patent application, look at drawings that accompany […]
Five Things Students Should Know About Google Books
Last week I wrote an explanation of why Google Books can be a helpful research tool for history students. In short, it helps students locate and search inside books without having to track down a physical copy of each book that they are interested in reading. If students do want a physical copy of a […]
Why You Should Try Refining Searches According to File Type
Much like refining Google search results according to site or domain, refining search results according to file type is a good way to discover information that is helpful but doesn’t rank well in Google search results. For example, Google Earth files often contain interesting historical and geological facts placed in a geographic context. A classic […]
How Excluding Words Helps Narrow the Scope of a Search
One of the options in Google’s Advanced Search menu is to exclude specific words from search results. At first, excluding words from search results might seem counterintuitive to learning as much as possible about a chosen research topic. After all, reading extensively about a topic is the best way to learn about it. However, there […]
What’s in Common? – A Search Lesson
Dan Russell has provided the inspiration for many of the web research lessons that I have conducted with students over the years. Every week he posts an interesting search challenge for readers then provides the answers a few days later. The challenges vary in difficulty, but I always learn something from them regardless of how […]
How to Find Published Google Workspaces Files
Refining Google searches according to domain is one of my favorite ways to get students to look beyond the first couple of pages of their typical Google search queries. Students can specify site or domain in Google’s advanced search menu to limit results to those that are only from top-level domains like .edu. They can […]
Ten Search Strategies Students Need to Know
Last week I hosted a Practical Ed Tech webinar titled Ten Search Strategies Students Need to Know. Afterwards I had many requests for accessing the recording of the webinar. The webinar is now available on demand. If you missed it, the webinar is available as an on-demand webinar right here on Practical Ed Tech. What’s […]
How to Improve Reverse Image Search Results
Reverse image search can be a good way to find more information about an object, animal, or person in a photograph. I use reverse image quite often when my daughters ask me about plants or animals that we see on our walks in the woods. To do that I take a picture and then upload […]
Three Search Refinement Tools Every Student Should Know How to Use
Search is something that everyone knows how to do as an act of typing or speaking a query. Unfortunately, too many students never get beyond the first few pages of Google search results before changing their search terms or giving up and declaring “Google has nothing on this!” Oftentimes just using a couple of search […]
How to Search for Open-Access Datasets
Last spring I had a chance to see Dan Russell give a presentation of a new Google search tool called Dataset Search. It spent 2019 in beta. Last week it lost beta label and is now widely available to anyone who wants to use it. In a recent blog post Dan Russell explained a couple […]
A Five Minute Explanation of How Google Search Works
Last week Google published a new video that explains how Google Search works. The video presents an explanation of the factors that contribute to why some pages rank higher in the results page than others. The video also explains the factors that can contribute to a change in the ranking of a webpage. Applications for […]
How Vocabulary Lists Help Students Conduct Better Searches
Can you identify this mushroomfound in the forest near my housein Maine? In chapter five of The Joy of Search Daniel Russell explains the process he used to determine whether or not a plant that he found was poisonous. When I read that chapter a couple of weeks ago I was struck with the reminder that […]
Another Approach to Creating Search Challenges for Students
Yesterday afternoon I shared one of my approaches to creating search practice activities for students. That strategy involves using pictures to tell as story and have students answer some questions based on the story and picture. Another approach that I use is to have students ask the questions that they want to know the answers […]
My Approach to Creating Search Practice Activities for Students
This week’s Practical Ed Tech Tip of the Week Newsletter featured ten Google search tips for students. It’s all well and good to give those tips to students and show them how to use them, but for the tips to really sink in students should get some practice using them. To that end, you can […]
50 Years of Migration Waves
This morning while reading a National Geographic article about animal migrations in national parks I stumbled onto a related feature titled Migration Waves. Migration Waves is a series of graphs depicted the movement of humans between countries between the years 1967 and 2017. The graphs on Migration Waves are grouped according to four factors that […]
Search Strategies Students Need to Know Now – Webinar This Thursday
The beginning of the new school year is a great time to introduce students to some new search strategies and to give them refreshers on techniques they may have forgotten about during the summer. That is why this Thursday at 4pm ET I’m hosting an updated version of my popular Search Strategies Students Need to […]
How to Refine a Search According to Top-level Domain
One of the overlooked search strategies that I often share with students and their teachers is refining Google search results according to top-level domain. Refining a search according to top-level domain is a good way for students to discover high-quality content that might not otherwise rank highly in their search results. The process of refining […]
The Joy of Search – Get a Sample Chapter and Learn a Great Search Strategy
The Joy of Search is the title of Dan Russell’s forthcoming book about search strategies. I pre-ordered my copy from Amazon about six weeks ago and am eagerly anticipating its arrival this fall. Dan Russell’s official title is Senior Research Scientist for Search Quality and User Happiness at Google. What he does that you, I, […]
Sub-image Search – A Strategy for Answering “What Is This?”
Image Credit: Becky Willough Earlier this week I had the good fortune to sit in on two presentations at TLA given by Daniel Russell. He is Google’s Senior Scientist in charge of search quality and user happiness. If you ever get the chance to hear him talk about search, take it! Even if you think […]
A Helpful Search Refinement Option for Students Studying Trending Topics
Earlier this month I published Ten Search Strategies Students Should Try. An eleventh strategy that students can try when they are researching current events, trending topics, or any rapidly changing topic is to refine results according to publication date. In the following video I demonstrate how students can refine search results according to publication date.
Building Image-based Search Challenges
On Monday I wrote about a couple of image-based search challenges that I do with students. I use those challenges as a way to get students to think about all of the search tools and search strategies that they have at their disposal. To solve the challenges students need to combine strategies and tools. I […]
Two Image-based Search Challenges to Use With Your Students
One of my favorite ways to reinforce the use of good search strategies to students is to show interesting pictures and have students try to make a long list of questions about what they see. Then I let the students try to find the answers to those questions. When they get stuck, I intervene to […]
Ten Search Strategies Students Should Try
Students often think that because they can type a phrase into Google or saying something aloud to Siri they know how to search. Of course, any teacher who has heard a student say “Google has nothing on this” or “there’s no information about my topic” knows that students don’t inherently know how to search despite […]
In Case You Forgot That Someone Is Always Watching…
From the pages of “Google knows when you are sleeping” comes Google’s latest search feature. Google has launched new activity cards for mobile search users. These new activity cards will appear at the top of your search page. The cards will suggest pages to you based on the last searches that you conducted. Google says […]
A Pre-search Checklist for Students
Last week I published two blog posts (here and here)in which I referenced having students make lists before they begin in-depth web research. A couple of readers have emailed me asking if I can give an example of the pre-search checklists that I mentioned in those posts. It’s not anything fancy, but I do have […]
How I Found a Google Earth File of 550+ Ancient Greek Places
Last night on Twitter Wes Fryer asked me if I knew of any Google Earth files that displayed ancient Greek locations. I didn’t have anything within my own bookmarks so I did a quick Google search that I filtered according to file type. I first filtered by file type .KMZ but that didn’t get me […]
Ten Search Strategies Students Should Know
If you have ever had a student tell you, “Google has nothing on this,” you know that students need help formulating good web search strategies. A few months ago I hosted a webinar on the ten search strategies that I think every student should know how to employ. That webinar is available on-demand on Practical […]
In Case You Missed It – Ten Search Strategies Students Need To Know
Yesterday 60 people joined my live presentation of my Practical Ed Tech webinar titled Ten Search Strategies Students Need To Know. More than a few of you have inquired about accessing the recording. It is now possible to access the recordings and handouts through this registration page. Some of the highlights of the webinar include: The […]
Three Search Tools Students Often Overlook
Google is the default search engine for many students. In fact, if your students have Chromebooks and the school has set Google as the default search engine, they may not even realize that there are search engines other than Google. Here are three search tools that students often overlook. Bing Sure this seems obvious and […]
Three Mistakes Students Make In Online Research
Whether it’s a simple question or a complex research task, the first thing students do is turn to Google for help. They might type a query into a Google search or, increasingly, they’ll speak their query into Google Assistant, Alexa, or Siri. That practice in itself can be a mistake. Here are three other mistakes […]
Advanced Google Search to Gain Different Perspectives
One of the activities that students are frequently asked to do is search for information on current and historical events from around the world. The issue is that when students perform a search, they typically are not searching in a manner that will provide results that offer different perspectives. For example, if a student is […]
A Handy Google Scholar Search Refinement Tool
As I mentioned a couple of weeks ago, I’m working on book. I’ve been doing quite a bit of research for the book through Google Scholar. One of the things that I have been researching is studies on students’ search behaviors. As this is topic that changes over time, I have been using the date […]
Trace the Evolution of Phones – A Search Challenge for Students
A couple of days ago Alexander Graham Bell’s drawing for his telephone patents was the featured document in the Today’s Document feed from the National Archives. Take a look at that drawing and you might start wondering, like I did, about how many changes and improvements to that design have been made since 1876. The […]
Three Things to Brainstorm Before You Search
One of the things that I ask students to do before they begin any research activity is to take some time to brainstorm. They might groan about having to do this instead of immediately typing or speaking search phrases, but it is good habit for students to develop. Here are three things students should brainstorm […]
Search Strategies and a Webinar FAQ
On Wednesday at 4pm Eastern Time I’m hosting a webinar called Search Strategies Students Need to Know. Over the weekend I had a few people ask me what the technical requirements are for joining the webinar. The webinars that I host only require you to have a modern web browser installed on your computer. I […]
Five Strategies to Help Students Conduct Better Informational Searches
Google is great for navigational and transactional searches. If you need to find your way to the movie theater or find the best price for a vacuum cleaner, Google handles those requests quite well. Searches for more meaningful information aren’t always handled well by Google. For example, see the some of the nonsense “suggested” search […]
How to Find Google Docs Published by Others
Earlier this week in my post about finding rubrics to use in JoeZoo Express I mentioned the idea of performing a Google search to find rubrics that other teachers have made in Google Docs and Sheets. I’ve had a couple of readers ask follow-up questions about how to do that. In the video embedded below […]
Two Helpful Tips for Navigating PDFs
One of the search tips that I often remind students about is, “search within your search results.” In other words, open up a webpage, a PDF, or a Word file and search within it before dismissing it as not relevant to your search. There are two simple ways that students can quickly search and navigate […]
How to Use Google Scholar to Track Product Developments
Last week I wrote about how students can use Google Scholar to track product developments and innovations over time. In the video embedded below I provide more details on how students can use Google Scholar and Google Patents to trace the history of a product’s development. We’ll cover topics like this one and many more […]
How to Refine Google Searches According to Date
Google’s search function has a lot of handy features that students often overlook while conducting research. One of those features is the option to refine search results according to a range of dates. As I explain in the video embedded below, refining a search according to date can be a good way to discover what […]
Google Books Ngram Viewer Overview
The Google Books Ngram Viewer is a search tool that displays when and how often a term appears in books indexed by Google Books. By using the Ngram Viewer you can discover when a term starts to appear in literature, how often a term appears, and when a term loses popularity in literature. In the […]
My Favorite Search Strategies – Updated
This morning during the Practical Ed Tech Chromebook Camp I shared some of my favorite strategies and ideas for helping students improve their online research skills. The slides that I used today were an updated version of slides that I have previously shared here on Free Technology for Teachers. The latest version is of the […]
How to Refine Google Searches by File Type & Domain
Two of the simple, but powerful Google search strategies that I often share in my workshops are searching by file type and searching by domain. Refining a search by file type and by domain can help students discover content that they might not otherwise discover through a typical Google search. In the video embedded below […]
Complete This Free Course and Become a Power Google Searcher
Power Searching With Google is a MOOC that Google initially offered nearly four years ago. The course is facilitated by Dr. Daniel Russell whose work I’ve featured many times over the years. The latest version of Power Searching With Google opens today and runs for two weeks. I went through Power Searching With Google the […]