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 […]
A Short Overview of the Wayback Machine
In yesterday’s blog post about unraveling an email scam I mentioned that I used the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine as a part of that process. The Wayback Machine is a useful tool for finding out what a website looked like a given point in time over the last 25 years. The Wayback Machine can be […]
How to Use the New Version of Google Books
On Monday I published a list of my ten go-to tech tools for social studies teachers and students. Google Books was one of the tools that I included in that list. Recently, Google Books got an updated user interface. The new interface includes some handy features including an option to quickly locate libraries near you […]
How to Use Google’s Dataset Search Tool
Yesterday, I wrote an overview of Google’s relatively new Dataset Search tool. It is a tool that is designed to help users locate publicly available datasets. As I explain in the following video, datasets aren’t limited to CSV or Excel files. Through the Dataset Search tool you will find datasets in the forms of Google […]
Find & Read Old Newspapers Through the Google Newspaper Archive
Yesterday’s blog post about the Chronicling America collection of digitized newspapers prompted Daniel Bassill to ask me about options for newspapers printed after 1963. My suggestion was to try the Google Newspaper Archive. In that archive you will find hundreds of digitized copies of newspapers printed around the world. In the archive you fill find […]
Britannica Insights – A Chrome Extension for Encyclopedia Britannica
Britannica Insights is a Chrome Extension that will show you entries from Encyclopedia Britannica in the right-hand margin of your Google search results. The way it works is that when you conduct a Google search the extension will generate a list of related Britannica articles on the same page as the Google results. Basically, the […]
7 Ways to Help Kids Discover & Analyze New Information
Today’s students have grown up with ubiquitous access to the Internet. That means that many of them think that because they can type something into Google they know how to search. Of course, we know that’s not the case. On October 17 I will be hosting a free webinar designed to help you help your […]
Learn Anything (Almost) Through These Interactive Mind Maps
Learn Anything is a neat website that is essentially a giant mind map. Enter a topic into the search box on Learn Anything and a mind map of related topics will appear. Each node of the mind map that appears is hyperlinked to either another mind map, to a video, or to text-based resources for […]
Credo Reference – Research Starters for Students
Credo Reference is a good reference site for students that I recently learned about from David Kapuler. Credo Reference provides students with reference articles from more than 4,000 reference books. In that regard Credo Reference is a search engine for encyclopedia entries. There are a few features of Credo Reference that teachers will appreciates. First, […]
Searching the Deep Web as Explained by Common Craft
When students conduct research on a public search engine like Google or Bing they are only scratching the surface of what could be found on the Internet. The rest of what students could find is in what’s often called the “deep web” or the “hidden web.” The latest addition to the Common Craft library explains […]
Google Books for Teachers and Students – A Guide
Google Books is one of my favorite research tools that students and teachers often overlook. In a post earlier today I embedded a book that I found through a Google Books search. Google Books allows you to do that with books that are in the public domain. I have done that a lot over the […]