Teach me how to Google

Google. It's a simple search engine... right? It's actually quite complex and ever changing. Google is the most used search engine especially for students.  Most of our students know how to get to the internet and type in google and proceed to type in some information and hit enter. The problem when you do that is there are numerous commercial sites and some are not trusted.  If you had the opportunity to attend our presentation this past November, you might remember that I discussed the idea that there are "bad neighborhoods" in live and online and we need to teach our students how to navigate both. 
We need to begin by helping students to understand the endings of each website which could be any of the following:

• .com (commercial site)
• .edu (educational site)
• .org (an organization site - typically a non-profit)
• .gov (government website)
  
• .net (network and computer topics)

Once students know and understand the differences in these sites, then we can teach them how to search safely.
If students have a topic they are interested in or need to research on "dogs". If they just type "dogs" they will get a ton of sites on images, Wikipedia, and other various commercial sites.  There are times when a basic search is perfectly fine, however, there are also times when students need more detailed information and searching in google can become frustrating.  If you type in "dogs -com" it will get rid of all .com websites.  If a student is looking specifically for educational sites or government sites, then they would type in: dogs site:edu or dogs site:gov.  Just these simple techniques for searching can help our students understand how to find valid information and stay away from "bad neighborhoods".
Here are the tips in bullet forms and can be changed to whatever you need specifically:

• -com (gets rid of .com sites)
• site:edu (only brings up educational sites)
• Clicking on the left hand side of google can bring up discussion boards, maps, recent timeline of information and much more.
  

Google is constantly updating the way their program works so encourage students to stay of top of these search techniques. 

Teaching our students how to search is key in giving them 21st Century Skills for the future