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Web search can be a remarkable tool for students, and a bit of instruction in how to search for academic sources will help your students become critical thinkers and independent learners. With the materials on this site, you can help your students become skilled searchers--whether they're just starting out with search, or ready for more advanced training.

Help your students become better searchers Web search can be a remarkable tool for students, and a bit of instruction in how to search for academic sources will help your students become critical thinkers and independent learners. With the materials on this site, you can help your students become skilled searchers- whether they're just starting out with search, or ready for more advanced training.

From the site: "I've been completely obsessed with Google's new mini-site devoted to finding better ways to incorporate proper web searches into the classroom. Dubbed 'Search Education,'Google's new site has an array of lesson plans, videos (check a sample out below), concept maps, and other tools designed to help any educator properly integrate Google." This is just the logical next step for the search (and basically everything else) behemoth as Google pushes its way into the classroom. As part of Search Education, Google has shared a bunch of lesson plans that are organized by degree of difficulty. So, if you consider yourself and / or your students Google experts, you should try out the more advanced plans. If you don't know what 'boolean' means, then you probably should start with the more basic stuff. The following are just some of the many lesson plans brought to you by Google. Check out the site for more info!

With more and more of the world's content online, it is critical that students understand how to effectively use web search to find quality sources appropriate to their task. We've created a series of lessons to help you guide your students to use search meaningfully in their schoolwork and beyond. On this page, you'll find Search Literacy lessons and A Google A Day classroom challenges. Our search literacy lessons help you meet the new Common Core State Standards and are broken down based on level of expertise in search: Beginner, Intermediate, or Advanced.

I cannot wait to look through these in depth. I was just thinking my lessons needed a bit more umph! Thanks for sharing!

free games to help learn to search and evaluate the web from the 21st century informaiton fluency project

"The answer to almost any question is available within seconds, courtesy of the invention that has altered how we discover knowledge - the search engine. Materializing answers from the air turns out to be the easy part - the part a machine can do. The real difficulty kicks in when you click down into your search results. At that point, it's up to you to sort the accurate bits from the misinfo, disinfo, spam, scams, urban legends, and hoaxes. "Crap detection," as Hemingway called it half a century ago, is more important than ever before, now that the automation of crapcasting has generated its own word: "spamming.""

Great lesson from Tania Shenko on effective Google searching.

Also see response @ http://www.peterpappas.com/2011/10/why-johnny-cant-search-a-response.html

Individual and group challenges are a great way to teach and practice information fluency. All aspects of searching and evaluation are covered by these game-like challenges, from turning questions into effective queries, picking the right databases, homing in while browsing, evaluating authors and content, and more. Challenges are linked to Common Core State Standards and Information Fluency Competencies

# 5 on this page is an excellent video by Howard Rheingold about the priorities for teaching information literacy in this world of the Internet, search engines, and social media.

21st Century Information fluency