Teaching Students to Google Like Pros

This academic year I'm fortunate to have been asked to help teach two separate research classes before school starts in the morning.

This was the first week of the project and I wanted to start with something that was (hopefully) fun and interesting. I decided to try and teach some Google searching shortcuts.

The students are 12-13 years of age and will be choosing their own research topic.

I started them out with a topic that I find interesting: The Voynich Manuscript.

If you haven't heard of it, The Voynich Manuscript is a 600 year old book written in a undecipherable code. Filled with esoteric illustrations of bizarre plants and other strange objects, it has eluded the smartest code breakers for well over 100 years.



This week I showed the students how to research the Voynich Manuscript effectively in the hopes it would help them research their own topics to a higher standard.

I started by introducing them to the Ted Ed web site.  This is a great place to start for any research topic. Using the Ted Ed site, I showed the students a short video on the Voynich Manuscript. It was the perfect way to introduce them to this weird and wonderful book.


I then introduced them to Google's quotation mark function. Googling a phrase in quotation marks ensures that all of the keywords are searched in that specific order.
Next was the "site" function.

What if you wanted to research the Voynich Manuscript but only wanted results from the BBC?

All you need to do is Google Voynich Manuscript site:bbc.co.uk and you're done.

 I also showed them how to expand this kind of search by Googling Voynich Manuscript site:edu to ensure all results were from web sites that ended in .edu, educational web sites that are often more reliable than .com sites.




The TedEd video briefly discusses that some people feel the Voynich Manuscript was written by an alien race that left the book behind for us to decipher.

I asked the students: What if we wanted to search for articles within Google that covered the Voynich Manuscript and also had the word "aliens" in the title?
 It's easy to do with the "intitle" function:

 
Next I showed the students the "filetype" function which allows you to search within Google for specific types of files. For instances, let's say we wanted to find PowerPoint presentations that have already been published on the Voynich Manuscript:

This will only provide results in PowerPoint format. You can choose PDF, Word Docs, whatever files you want.

I also showed the students Google Scholar. Many of Scholar's articles are subscription-based but you can occasionally find free PDFs by simply scrolling down through the results and looking for the PDF link on the right.
Google Scholar also allows you to set up email alerts so you can be notified when a new article is published on the topic you are researching.




I wanted to show students other reliable web sites as well. Sweet Search has been one that I have used over the past few years although their format has changed slightly and you now see a lot of ads at the top of the results field.

That said, Sweet Search still only searches within 35,000 articles that have been reviewed by teachers, professors, librarians and other professionals, making it worth checking out.

We also discussed finding images that were copyright free. Although the Voynich Manuscript is in the public domain, I stressed to the students how important it is to find images within the creative commons and that simply plucking photos from Google images is essentially stealing.

My favourite image site is Pixabay, although I also use Stockvault and Creative Commons images.





To finish, I used Nearpod for a fun exercise that allowed me to gather some feedback on what the students had learned.
For more info on how to use Nearpod, click here.

Nearpod is a great way to bring a classroom together around the topic you are teaching as it ensures that every student is looking at the exact same thing at the same time.

Within Nearpod, I asked the students what they thought about the Voynich Manuscript: Hoax? Real? Alien cookbook? Then, for fun, I asked them to try and draw an image that might belong within this strange document.


Feedback from the teachers and students has been very positive on these tips. I know it's a lot to take in so my next goal is to create a "cheat sheet" with as many of these search tips as I can cram in. This way, I hope the students can develop more effective research skills that they can carry with them through their academic career.