Information and digital literacy in education via the digital path

The visual below features some important  tips to help you better use Google Image in your instruction. More specifically, you will get to learn how to run a reverse image search, how to use advanced Image settings, and how to filter images through a wide variety of usage rights.

For those of you who haven’t seen it yet, here is a handy visual featuring 8 important Google Drive search tips for teachers. More specifically, you will get to learn how to: search for a document that contains a specific phrase, search for files that contain at least one of the words, find documents that do not contain a particular word, find documents owned or shared by or with a particular person, search your Drive by document type, search for documents edited before or after a specific period of time, find documents by title, and finally find items that can be opened by only certain apps.

Twelve years ago I had student come up to me in the library and declare, “Mr. Byrne, Google has nothing on this!” Her topic was the Civil War. It was then that I realized my students needed a bit more guidance on how to conduct online research. In the years since that incident in the library I have spent a lot of time developing search lessons for students to help them become better at search. All of the lessons that I’ve created incorporate at least one of the following ten tips.

Students often think that because they can type a phrase into Google or saying something aloud to Siri they know how to search. Of course, any teacher who has heard a student say "Google has nothing on this" or "there's no information about my topic" knows that students don't inherently know how to search despite growing up in a world filled with Google and Siri. When your students need help formulating or refining a search, have them review the following ten tip. Better yet, have them review these tips before starting their next searches.

This is an excerpt from a book that I have been working on for the last fifteen months. I'm getting close to finishing it. 

Our students have become accustomed to entering a search into Google as soon as they are confronted by a question to which they don’t have an answer on the tips of their tongues. However, if they’re forced to take a few minutes before they search, they often find that they already know the answer. This is why a pre-search checklist should include listing what you already know about a topic. This list can be generated from memory or from notebooks (physical and digital). Not only does this process refresh students' memories, it also saves time in the long-run because they aren't spending time searching for information that they already have.

The CILIP Information Literacy Group (ILG) has published revised versions of its Research Smarter resource sheets "designed to help secondary school students research effectively and be information literate". There are 10 of them, each 1 or 2 sides of A4, "made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 licence, so they can be shared, reproduced and re-used widely". Topics include: Referencing your research; Why do I need to research my topic?; Research is a messy process; What search engines are out there?

You can get the sheets at https://infolit.org.uk/information-literacy-group/school-resource-sheets/

Improve your online research skills and your ability to critically analyse sources of information.

Unlike search results on Google.com, Google Scholar search results isn’t a ranking of websites. Instead, Google Scholar search results are lists of scholarly articles related to your query. Google Scholar can also be used to locate United States patent filings as well as state and federal court cases.

In our new remote teaching and learning environments students may find themselves having to look things up online more than ever before. Even if you're hosting online class meetings in Zoom, Google Meet, or Microsoft Teams there will still be lots of time when students need to do some research on their own. This is a good time to remind students about some basic search strategies like creating a search checklist and consulting vocabulary lists as part of the search process. Once they've done those basics it might be time for them to try some other search tools that often get overlooked.

The power of Google search engine lies in its hidden features. Getting precise search results requires much more than simply comping up with a random search query and hitting  ‘I am feeling lucky’ button. Google search is a skill that needs to be explicitly taught to students.

Over 1.2 trillion Google searches are done per year; that’s more than 40,000 searches per second. It’s so easy to type in a few keywords or a question when searching the web. Despite the magnificence of Google and other search engines, they cover only 4% (about 8 billion pages) of the world wide web; the additional 96% goes way beyond Google… 

The most significant portion of the world wide web, the invisible web, is inaccessible by search engines like Google. It’s also called the deep web. Before we show you how to research beyond Google, let’s first answer questions you’re probably asking at this point. Is the deep web also the dark web? Is it legal to access the Deep Web? 

The key to unlocking the educational potential of the virtual world is through knowing how to effectively search it with the minimum time and efforts possible. Effective search in this sense refers to the ability to locate targeted information online using ‘informed search queries’. It does take time and practice to develop such an ability but it is worth every single second you spend learning it.