Sunday, February 17, 2013

Chapter 5

Chapter 5- Researching and Evaluating Internet Information

Focus Question- What are search engines and how do they work?

In todays world there are other resources besides the traditional book that information can be pulled from. One of the biggest and easiest resources today is the internet and the use of its search engines which retrieve information from the internet. A search engine is a software program that uses networks of computers to access information about a topic from its database. Search engines are remarkably fast and can instantly connect you with millions of web pages from just a key word or phrase. You can see with this tool available, people are able to access much more information, faster, and with out leaving their house. This makes research papers, studying, and even a simple question easier to do and answer.

Basically, all search engines customize explorations of the web using keywords which are words or phrases used by search engines to locate matching web ages. By using keywords it limit searches by focusing on specific categories, narrowing a search to specific rather then genera categories. There are search engines available for both general and specialized searching. Each kind of search engine allows you to restrict or expand your searching criteria. and provides you with tips on modifying your searches to try to make sure you get all you'll need. The most popular search engine currently is google with others like Yahoo!, Bing, MSN, AOL, and Ask close behind. Even with these, teachers and students benefit more form directly focused academic topics, educational standards, and learning materials. Two really good specialized search engines are Flickr and LibriVox, which allows you to locate photo and audio resources on the web.

Tech Tool Link: In this video there is a tutorial to how to use LibriVox. This goes into detail and is quite useful to watch prior to working with LibriVox.

Summary:
Search engines are a useful tool to use to gather information. Using keywords you can narrow down the websites shown to you to only the ones that would be useful to you. As valuable as those general search engines are, teachers and students benefit more from search tools that focus on academic topics and LibriVox is a good example of that.

Resources:
Franklin, T., Duran, M. & Kariuki, M. (2001). Mentoring Overcomes Barriers to Technology Integration. In J. Price et al. (Eds.), Proceedings of Society for Information Technology & Teacher Education International Conference 2001 (pp. 848-849). Chesapeake, VA: AACE.

1 comment:

  1. Google's mission is to be the best search engine in the world - I think that since the word, "google" is now in the dictionary. The issue of searching has become more complex with the internet, but Google, of course, is not the only way to search and no matter the tool, one must always use the 'critical thinking' skills we have to analyze and evaluate the website results as to their usefulness and validity.

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