Introduction:
Skillful searches are essential for 21st century learning and information literacy. With abundant information at our fingertips it is important to teach and reinforce literate searching.In this beginning search lesson students will take a look at search engines. By challenging students to understand the basics of search and how to understand results they'll learn how they can "drive" a search engine to deliver the results they need.
Objectives:
Inquiry question: How does search work on the web?
- Students will identify the basic parts of a web search engine and define web search terms
- Students will learn to "read" a web search results page
Materials:
Activities:
Use the "Start Your Engines" Google Presentation provided with this lesson to introduce students to Search. Slides that go with each section of this lesson are indicated by number [Slide #1] Stop for class discussion where indicated on the slide.
1. Introduce some basic definitions used in web search. [Slides #2, #3, #4] The slides will ask students to define these terms:
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*Define: Search Engine
Possible Answers: a computer program that retrieves documents or files or data from a database or from a computer network (especially from the Internet)
 *Define: Browser
Possible Answers: A program used to view HTML documents
*Define: Website
Possible Answers: a collection of web pages, a collection of links between pages, programs that do services (such as look up things)
*Define: Query
Possible Answers: What one is looking for when using a search engine to find relevant websites
*Define: URL
Possible Answers: The address of a web page on the world wide web.
Use [Slide #4] to go over the parts of a URL
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*Visible web: everything that’s indexed by search engines
*Deep web: everything that’s on the web, but not indexed
B. Students generate a of list any database "deep web" sources that they might be able to access from their school or local libraries.
3. Show or distribute print handouts of [Slide #7] and have students discuss in groups what each part of the page means. When completed, discuss the labels as a class [Slide #8].
4. Access the Google Search page on a computer display and ask students to put a search query into the box and try the “I Feel Lucky” button. Then ask them to try the same query using the Google Search button. Ask them to explain the difference that they see.
5. With the class, do a couple of searches and analyze the search results page. Explain to students how to read the results on those pages [Slide #9].
6. Share the tip of using the "Find" command on the browser (Edit>Find or Control-F) to find a term in a search results page or any web page. Demonstrate using this command to locate the search keywords across the search results page.
7. Show YouTube video "Matt Cutts Discusses Snippets" and discuss with students how a snippet can help them understand search choices. [Slide #10].
Homework:
Assessment Questions:
Connections to Standards:
Teacher Notes:
Time needed to teach:
1 Week
Tags:
Web search
