Searching - One of the most important skills you need to learn today

Today, just about anything you want to learn is available at your fingertips.  The key is knowing how to effectively and efficiently find what you're looking for and validate that it's accurate information.  The search tools and apps are becoming more sophisticated by the day, but there are still searching strategies and tips that everyone should know to help improve your results and get to the answers you seek.  We all occasionally complain that we don't have enough time, so better searching should help you acquire a few more precious moments in your day.

Better searching could also save you from making a big mistake....

Or save the day in a tight pinch...

Or make you a hero with your kids...

Or even land you that dream job...

While these examples are fun, often times the problem you are trying to solve or the research you are trying to gather requires you to dig deeper than the first hits you get from a simple search.  I believe that searching should be taught or reviewed in every class, regardless of grade level, at the beginning of each year.  Heck, I'd even go so far as to say that we should consider making it part of high school graduation requirements in some way.  Maybe one day.  Until then, there are lots of opportunities to improve your searching skills on your own.  For many, including me, the search engine of choice is Google and there are two phenomenal self-paced courses that you can take at any time to help you learn the power searching skills you need.  Even if you don't want to go through the courses, the brief videos would still be worth your time to watch.  I strongly recommend that you check them out at http://www.powersearchingwithgoogle.com/.

Work Together On Research with Search Team

Thanks to the Technology Tidbits blog I learned about Search Team. This collaborative search engine allows users to create SearchSpaces and then invite others to join in the research. I really like this tool as an alternate to having a team of people do searches in isolation and then share their findings via email, wiki, social bookmarks, or other digital format. Search Team is specifically designed for finding and organizing resources as a team and allows each team member to add resources, folders, comments, files, annotations, and more. There is even an ongoing log of recent activity for team members to review when they log in. I can see this being used by both teams of teachers and teams of students for various research projects. If a teacher assigns students to work together and set up a SearchSpace, I'd recommend having them add the teacher as a team member. This way the teacher can easily monitor the work of the group and review the activity log to make sure everyone is pulling their weight. For those schools using Google Apps for Education, it gets even better because you can have/require your team members to use their Google accounts to sign in. Please consider leaving a comment with your thoughts or success stories. Here an intro video clip with more info about Search Team:

Google Search Tips Posters

Thanks to the Free Technology for Teachers blog for finding some helpful Google search tips handouts/posters. Check them out here.

Google Realtime Search

Realtime Search lets you see up-to-the-second social updates, news articles and blog posts about hot topics around the world.