Google Search Education

Last week Google introduced another great resource for helping to educate students on how to search efficiently using Google's search engine.  Google Search Education is a great place to find lesson plans and other great resources for your students.  The lesson plans are arranged according to skill level in five categories.: picking search terms, understanding results, narrowing results, searching for evidence, and evaluating credibility of sources.  My favorite part of the Google Search Education page is the ability to search the Google-A-Day questions by content area (see below).  I think these short warm-up activities are a great way to develop search skills by modeling them to the class or thinking aloud together as you search for the answer.

Now What?

The ability to search effectively is becoming increasingly important as more and more information is put onto the web each and every day.  Students have a habit of typing their questions directly into Google to find the answer which usually brings them to a site like Yahoo answers or Wiki answers which rely on user generated content which is not always the most reliable answer.  The lessons and search questions on Google Search Education are a great way to fundamentally change the way the students search for information.