Tag Archives: Research

Google Research Tool

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Google have added an interesting new feature to Google Docs, the Google research tool. When you open up a document you will now see a sidebar which allows you to perform a web search. Results are displayed in this panel and can be quickly added to a document. If you can’t see the sidebar, you can display it by selecting Tools>Research.

We had a look at this new feature this morning, and recorded a quick screencast of our first impressions. Have a look at the video below to see how it all works. The drag and drop features certainly looks to be a time saver and the automatic referencing is also a handy tool.

At this stage only results from Google search are displayed, but we probably couldn’t expect other search engines to be included, could we? We hold out hope that other search options may be included in future versions. Once again, this may again lead to a discussion with students about the importance of cross checking information and using a range of reliable resources.

Despite this minor quibble, Google research tool certainly looks like a handy way to get started with research and to keep track of any resources accessed.

Have a look at our first impressions below.

Library guides at the State Library

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Librarians from the State Library of Victoria have been putting together Library guides on various subject areas to help people with their research tasks.

It’s essentially a cheat sheet that guide you through the research process by wading through the array of resources available to you.

Here’s a sample of what’s been created:
1. Aboriginal people & the law
2. Adoption & forgotten Australians
3. Bushfires
4. Companies in Australia
5. Court cases in Australia
6. Early Australian census records
7. Finding Australian legislation
8. Finding book reviews
9. Finding music scores & popular songs
10. Finding poetry

Image of research guide on census

There are 28 more guides on a range of topics but you can see the entire list here.

It’s commonplace for universities to have library guides, so do check them out for other subject areas, especially for senior students. Or you can create your own easily and quickly, in LibGuides.

Let us know if you’ve already created some LibGuides – we’d love to hear about them.

Test your search skills: A Google a day

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A Google a Day

Whether we like it or not, for many students (and adults) the first step in any research task is to visit Google. There are many great resources that can be used to teach students about creating more specific, powerful searches, such as Google Inside Search which guides you through some advanced search functions.

Once students read these tips, they need some way to apply their knowledge to specific tasks. The website A Google a Day provides a question each day which can be solved using a search engine.  A timer runs while you search for the solution, and you can also click on a series of clues which will step you through the search process. For those who are completely stumped, the answer can be provided along with an explanation of how to find it online. The questions can vary in quality, but there are enough good ones in the archive to test out your searching skills.  Click the arrows at the bottom of the frame to see previous questions.

Interestingly, one of the problems with the site comes due to its popularity. You’ll often find that when you search for older answers the top results will be pages linking to blogs about A Google a Day. This might lead to a discussion about how search engines like Google actually index the web.  One possible solution might be to develop your own questions for students to solve. Have a read through the archive to get some ideas about what works and which questions are less effective.

My Place in History

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Recently I was introduced to this new program for Australian Primary Schools.

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My Place in History, a new educational programme for Australian upper primary schools, is a web-based programme designed to teach students about the concepts of change and diversity – of backgrounds, in family structures, and the many economic, political and social circumstances in both our distant and more recent history that have contributed to who we are today and how we all came to be living in Australia.

Family history experts, Ancestry.com, created this resource to encourage understanding of family and social history from an early age by utilising the very latest in online technology and historical information. My Place in History has been designed for teachers by teachers and is tailored to each state’s individual curriculum.  A collection of specially designed online resources and activities have been developed to make learning about history and their family’s role within this both educational and engaging.

My Place in History

Students will explore their own personal family history, creating family trees online, whilst learning about the key drivers of change within society during the lives of their ancestors – wherever they came from – and how these changes impacted their own identity, as well as that of their family and society more generally.

Over the course of the programme students will look back over two generations of their own family and how society changed during the lives of their older family members and ancestors.

Unit 1: Change through History

Students will learn about significant changes that have occurred over time in transport, communication, manufacturing, housing, leisure, food, technology, purchasing, and medicine.

Unit 2: My Society through History

Students will develop an understanding of history as it applies to their community. The initial focus is on the school; the subsequent focus is on a section of a nearby community.

Unit 3: My Family History

Students will research and understand a minimum of two generations of their own family through the use of oral history and interactive resources.

The website also provides fun, educational games for students and an opportunity for teachers to privately upload and store their own digital resources free of charge.

My Place in History looks like a great resource for the ubiquitous family tree project.

DeweyDigger

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Have you seen DeweyDigger yet?

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By clicking on one of the Dewey classifications, you are then presented with a range of topics that would be found under that classification.

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Clicking on one of those you are then presented with a range of options to dig further.

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Beware that some of these options include advertisements and one that I saw was for gambling. However, the initial stages of the site could be very useful for teaching the concept of Dewey. Worth a look.

findingDulcinea: librarian of the internet

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Big sister to Sweet search, findingDulcinea is a must see site for school library staff. The aim of the founders of the site is “to bring users the best information on the Web for any topic, employing human insight and methodical review.”

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So what exactly does findingDulcinea provide?

FindingDulcinea selects and annotates credible, high-quality and trustworthy Web sites, saving time for both the novice and experienced user.

Each piece, whether a Web Guide, a Beyond the Headlines news story or a Netcetera feature article, undergoes the same meticulous research. The Web sites included in each piece are connected through original narrative, providing users with information on each site before they visit them.

  • Web Guides
  • Beyond The Headlines
  • Netcetera
  • Custom Search

findingDulcinea provides a range of web guides to popular research topics. Their FAQ page explains:

Our Web Guides provide resources on thousands of topics.

Our collection of Web Guides began with the original Guide to Web Search. With the Guide to Web Search, you should be able to find any Web resource you need, but we’ve drilled down into much more specific topics to help with more targeted search.

Our collection of nearly 300 topic-specific Web Guides is always growing, and the Web Guides already on the site are updated frequently by our research team.

The Guides include fun topics such as Family Travel, academic subjects such as Elementary School Social Studies Resources, serious health topics such as Leukemia.

To find a Web Guide use our site search function (in the upper right corner of any findingDulcinea Web page) or browse our guides from the most general guide on the Web Guides main page to the most specific guides by using the Web Guide topics shown on the right side of any Web Guides page.

More information is available in this video:

Although the site has a US bias, there are plenty of web guides and other resources for global audiences.

Sweet search

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This is an incredibly useful search engines for teachers to use with students at every level. In fact it is more than once search engine, as you can see in this screenshot:

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Sweet search has been developed carefully:  “It searches only the 35,000 Web sites that our staff of research experts and librarians and teachers have evaluated and approved when creating the content on findingDulcinea. We constantly evaluate our search results and “fine-tune” them”.

Their blog post explains even more:

SweetSearch is the product of 100,000+ hours of research that went into creating findingDulcinea’s 700+ Web Guides and thousands of articles. This content links to tens of thousands of Web sites that have been evaluated and deemed reliable by our research experts and librarian and teacher consultants (for a bevy of reviews of findingDulcinea and SweetSearch from top educators, see our media kit; or get a widget for SweetSearch, so you can embed it on your school Web site.).

For younger learners, we’ve recently introduced a beta version of SweetSearch4Me, which is the only search engine that prominently ranks high quality Websites created for elementary (primary) school students, and mixes them with accessible primary source sites. Please send feedback on SweetSearch4Me to sweetsearch@dulcineamedia.com so we can fully launch it with your input in September.

Sweet search also has a terrific page for school librarians.

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This page has information on:

  • research guides
  • tips for better research
  • news of the day
  • improving research habits and more.

This site comes highly recommended from educators globally. However, as always, check it out first to see if it suits your needs.

Historical Facebook

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Recently edtech guru Richard Byrne wrote about a way to encourage students to research using the concept of Facebook. By creating a faux Facebook account for a person of interest, students need to research that person and try to bring their personality to life. Derrick Waddell has developed a template that any teacher can freely use.

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To read the entire post, click here.

Note: Students will NOT set up a Facebook account, this is merely a template based on the Facebook concept and layout.

The State Library of Victoria Education Services have also alerted me to an interactive way for teachers to bring Shakespeare to life for their students. Sarah Schmelling created this Facebook page for Hamlet:

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Again, Facebook does not have to be used for this unit, but using the template above, students could create new Shakespearean scenes, scenarios, characters or plays, update the play they are studying or develop conversations between characters.

A great way to bring history to life for our students using a format they are familiar with.

Mashpedia

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Looking for an online, multimedia, real time encyclopedia? Mashpedia is just that and is worth using with students.

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The website explains more:

Mashpedia is a web encyclopedia enhanced with cutting-edge functionalities and sophisticated features such as multimedia content, social media tools and real-time information, accessible to people all over the world. It’s free to use and open for public participation, allowing users to discuss specific topics, post and answer questions, share relevant links or contribute in new creative ways. Mashpedia integrates a variety of online services and applications like Wikipedia, YouTube, Twitter, Flickr, Google News, Books, Blog Posts, and further contextual information into a single slick interface, presenting an organized outlook of live content feeds for every topic, thus providing a broad spectrum of services and features that eliminate the user’s need to visit each service separately.

The FAQ page explains more:

Mashpedia aggregates multiple web feeds (streams of content from different sources) into structured articles about specific, encyclopedic terms, historic events and popular individuals, groups, organizations, companies, etc.
Every article provides a basic definition of the term, along with the most relevant videos about it, a stream of current Twitter messages, latest news, images, blog posts and links. Mashpedia also offers semantic connections between the articles, in form of links.
Even though there are advertisements on Mashpedia, it is a worthy search tool for (at least) older students as it gives a real overview of a topic from many different points of view and many different types of media.