Ana's Blog

Focus question: What are search engines and how do they work?

Search engines are software programs that retrieve information from the internet. For example, Google, Yahoo, Bing, DuckDuckGo, Ask.com, Yippy, Webopedia, Dogpile, and Mahalo are all different search engines. These search engines “uses networks of computers to access information from its databases” (Maloy, R. W., Verock-O, R. E., Edwards, S. A., & Woolf, 2011).

Search engines enable users to search for documents on the World Wide Web by typing in keywords. Keywords are used to locate matching webpages and specify searches. It focuses on specific categories and not general categories. More than 90% of people use search engines to locate information. Google is one of the favorite search engines used over others. I use Google for everything and I’ve never used other ones.

Teachers and students are able to use other search engines that allow them to focus on academic topics. For example, Internet Public Library, Voice of the Shuttle, Artcyclopedia, Library of Congress American Memory, and Open Library. These are specialized search engines that is academically valuable.

Search engines uses complex formulas to generate search results. Upon typing a keyword and searching, “query results in the form of active hyperlinks are displayed once the search is complete” (Maloy, R. W., Verock-O, R. E., Edwards, S. A., & Woolf, 2011). It uses algorithm, which takes key elements of a web page and come up with a ranking for where to place the results on the pages. These algorithms are always going through revision and modification. These search engines use underlying HTML structure to determine relevance such as text.

Tech Tool link: Photos and Audio Resources on the Web.

The article discusses about how pictures and sound are great resources for teaching. It’s a way to engage students and get them to understand the ideas a teacher is trying to communicate. Flickr, LibriVox, and Creative Commons are websites that will help the teacher access photo and audio sources. Flickr is basically an online photo managing and sharing tool. LibriVox contains free audio recordings of books. Creative Commons is a website that consists of photos and videos.

Summary & Connection:

This chapter discusses about how to use the Internet for teaching, learning, and developing information in schools. Teachers use educational information to develop lively curricula and be able to answer students. Students use information to write essays, take exams, acquire knowledge, and develop personal talents.

People acquired information by books, newspapers, magazines, libraries, classes in school, conferences, and presentations. We still use these, but we have turned towards the Internet for information. It’s fast, simple, and easy to just type in a word and get immediate results. I believe it’s important for teachers and students to develop digital literacies. They will be able to locate, gather, organize, interpret, synthesize, manage, present, use, and evaluate information from the Internet.

The chapter further discusses what search engines are and how they work. It provides search engines that are focused on educational topics. When searching, you have three ways to search the Internet: free-text, keyword/exact match, and Boolean. A teacher needs to introduce students to search sites designed for them, teach them to critically evaluate results, and use visual search tools. Students can use electronic note-taking to recall information they have located during searches. For example, NoteStar, Evernote, and OneNote are all different electronic note-taking programs.

Teachers need to teach students ways on how to evaluate online materials for slant, bias, and purpose of information. Schools censor, filter, partitions, and label information so that students can search safely. In order to evaluate a website, students should consider these five criteria: accuracy, authority, objectivity, currency, and coverage. They also need to recognize the URL such as .com, .biz, .org, .gov, .net, .edu, .mil, .info, .k12, .ca, .uk, and .nz.

Schools focuses on teaching students how to think and act as digital citizens. Schools have adopted Acceptable Use Policies, which states how technology is used and what the consequences are for breaking the rules. Teachers have to teach their students about copyright, fair use, plagiarism and cheating. Cyberbullying can occur to students while they use the Internet. That’s why as teachers, we need to have a zero tolerance policy to online communications. We need to teach students the negative consequences that cyberbullying causes.

Resources:

Maloy, R. W., Verock-O, R. E., Edwards, S. A., & Woolf, B.P. (2011). Transforming learning with new technologies. (2nd ed.). Boston, MA: Pearson Education Inc.

What is a search engine? (n.d.). Retrieved from http://designhammer.com/services/seo-guide/search-engines