Monthly Archives: April 2009

Teaching Web Searching Strategies

Teaching web searching skills is an important part of supporting students.  When the web was new and none of our students had access to it at home, we teachers would never dream of sending young people to the computer lab to do research without giving them instructions on using the Internet to search for resources.  Today, our kids are 100 times more comfortable using the computer and the Internet, but they still waste a lot of time searching when they could be more efficient with 30 minutes of instruction on web-search strategies.  Following how to “search” should come some direct instruction on how to “evaluate” what you find.  There are getting to be more and more poor resources on the Internet all the time.  Teaching kids to critically anaylze what they find is important, too.  This video from Common Craft is a short, high-interest intro (about 3 minutes) to help kids focus their searching skills.

A fun lesson that I’ve used in the past to emphasize the need for critical evaluation is to send students to some “fake” websites and pretend to be impressed by new information or new product that you “just heard about” on the web.  Education World has a great comprehensive list of good sites here. (My personal favorites are the Endangered Tree Octopus and DiHydrogen Monoxide.  After a few minutes of impressing the kids, explain that these are all fake sites that look great, but the information on them is totally bogus.  I’ve had several teachers in workshops over the years who just can’t believe that they would “allow” such false information on the web!

However we go about it, it is important that we don’t assume that young people know everything about the Internet and how to use it efficiently just because they can navigate it easily.  We can still improve their ability to work efficiently and to think critically if we spend a little time at it!

Image Chef

ImageChef.comImage Chef is a great creativity site that allows you work with words and graphics to make your own images, remixes, even animated email greetings.  You don’t have to register, but if you do, you can “keep” an album to share as well.  Code for embedding into your blogs and/or Facebook is easy to copy and paste! This flower word picture is my first attempt using the tool called “Word Mosaic.”  Very intuitive and easy to use!  Visit there at www.imagechef.com and hit the “create” tab to get started.  What ideas come to mind for using this with kids?