Search Strategies Students Need to Know – A New Practical Ed Tech Course

A couple of weeks ago I hosted a live Practical Ed Tech webinar titled Search Strategies Students Need to Know! I’ve now taken the content and concepts of that webinar and broken into a self-paced mini course. Search Strategies Students Need to Know contains ten self-paced modules, templates for helping students conduct better online research, […]

Three Ideas for Encouraging Students to do Research in Digital Archives

Yesterday morning I wrote about the challenge of getting students to use resources like academic databases and digital archives in their research. This morning I received an email from a reader who asked if I could share an example or ideas of how to encourage students to use digital archives in their research. The following […]

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 […]

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 […]

Lessons to Help You and Your Students Become Better Researchers

If you’re looking to improve your search skills this summer or you want to find new ideas for teaching search skills, check out Power Searching With Google. Power Searching With Google was hosted by Google back in 2012. With the exception of the live Hangouts on Air that were held during the course, all of […]

Vocabulary Lists Could Help Your Students Conduct Better Searches

As I mentioned in a video posted earlier today, I have been doing some research about how students search. Specifically, they’re search habits and how those habits influence outcome of their searches. It’s quite fascinating even if much of what I’m reading is rather dry data crunching. One of the research reports that I read […]

Simple, Effective Search Challenge Lessons

What Connects These Things? – 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 […]

The Hardest Type of Web Search for Students

There are three basic types of searches that students conduct on the Internet. Those types of searches are navigational, transactional, and informational. Navigational searches are conducted to find something specific like a website or physical location. Transactional searches are conducted for the purpose of trying to purchase something. Informational searches are conducted to discover information […]

Top Tips for Teaching Search Strategies – Free Webinar Tomorrow

Tomorrow at 4pm Eastern Time I will be leading a free webinar on the topic of teaching search strategies to students. The webinar, sponsored by Choosito, will feature strategies that can be used by students across a number of search engines. Part of the webinar will also include an overview of the aspects of Choosito […]

My Favorite Internet Search Tips for Teachers & Students

Whether you teach students who are ten years old or forty years old there will be times when they turn to you and say, “I can’t find anything about this” while they are researching. In most cases the problem isn’t that the Internet doesn’t hold any information for them. Rather, the problem is that students […]