Ten Steps to Better Web Research

Last fall I published Beyond Google which examines fifteen tools and strategies for getting students to look beyond the first two pages of Google search results. This morning I found through Kevin Jarrett a great presentation that complements my ebook. Teaching the Ten Steps to Better Web Research is a Slideshare presentation created by Mark Moran and Shannon Firth at Dulcinea Media. Dulcinea Media is the producer of Sweet Search a search engine for students. The presentation includes some statistics about students' search strategies (or lack thereof) that all educators should be aware of. It's those statistics that lead into the ten steps for teaching students how to search effectively and how to analyze the results of their searches. View the presentation below.

Teaching the Ten Steps to Better Web Research

View more presentations from SweetSearch.

Sweet Search 2Day - Best of the Web for Students

Dulcinea Media, host of the academic search engine Sweet Search, has a new free offering for teachers and students called Sweet Search 2 Day. Sweet Search 2 Day is a one page stop for good, up to date, web content that can be used in Science, History, and Language Arts classes. Visitors to Sweet Search 2 Day will find some entertaining content, cartoons and image galleries, that is safe for classroom environments. Sweet Search 2 Day also hosts some useful reference materials, like "how to write a bibliography," for students and parents.

Thanks to Kyle Pace for the Tweet that drew my attention to Sweet Search 2 Day.

Applications for Education
If you're in need of some quick, relevant talking points or conversation starters for your classes, Sweet Search 2 Day might be a good resource for you to bookmark. Looking for some academic brainteasers? Sweet Search 2 Day has you covered there too.

Developing Critical Thinking Through Web Research

As we know, the Internet is a great place to find information on anything that sparks your curiosity. Likewise, the web is a great resource for students, but they need to know how to evaluate what they find and discern the good from the bad. That's where we come in as teachers. And to help us help our students, Microsoft offers us a free 37 page ebook titled Developing Critical Thinking Through Web Research Skills. The ebook presents strategies for teaching Internet search skills and strategies for evaluating information. The ebook also links to many additional resources for teaching web search strategies. There are strategies and resources appropriate for students from in early elementary grades through high school included in the ebook. As you might expect, the ebook is heavy on references to Bing and other Microsoft products, but overall it is a good resource worth your time to download and read.

H/T to Steven Anderson for sharing this resource on Twitter.

Here are some related items that may be of interest to you:
How Web Search Works
Sweet Search - A Search Engine for Students
How to Create a Custom Search Engine

Sweet Search - A Search Engine for Students

Sweet Search is a search engine that searches only the sites that have been reviewed and approved by a team of librarians, teachers, and research experts. In all there are 35,000 websites that have been reviewed and approved by Sweet Search. In addition to the general search engine, Sweet Search offers five niche search engines. The niche search engines are for Social Studies, Biographies, SweetSites (organized by grade and subject area), School Librarians, and Sweet Search 4 Me (for elementary school students).

Sweet Search can be used by visiting the site directly or you can embed Sweet Search widgets into your blog or website.

Applications for Education
If you're concerned about your students stumbling onto sites that aren't reliable, try having them use Sweet Search. You could accomplish the same thing by creating a Google Custom Search Engine, but Sweet Search has already done essentially the same thing for you. Put one of the Sweet Search widgets into your classroom blog or school website so that students can search reliable sites within a familiar context.

Here are some related items that may be of interest to you:
How Web Search Works
Lesson Plans for Teaching Web Search Strategies
How to Create a Custom Search Engine