WEB SEARCH

Day III                     (7th July)

ICT in modern system of education is like the spinal cord to support different branches of studies at finger tips. It is the source of knowledge , information and a tool to boost the learning at all levels. This paper will take you through some of the web search engines that were introduced to us during our classes. 

During the day's session on Web Search we were introduced to the following:

• Google Scholar for our Research
• Boolean Operator 
• Search Smarter, Search faster 
• Truncation
• Wild cards

The following are brief description of the web search listed above:

Google Scholar	Boolean Operator	Search smarter Search Faster	Truncation	Wild card
A search engine that searches wide variety of sources, including academic publishers, universities, articles and theses. Areas of Scholarly Reasearch -Searches a specific subject of Google’s index -Covers wide range of academic content areas -Results are shown like the Google web search- shows the list according to the search query. Articles Click article link to see if full article are available, if not you can access them on campus with settings done. Help Ask librarian if you are having difficulty	A search engine which allows users to combine keywords with operators such as AND, NOT and OR to further produce more relevant results. AND Narrows our search/limits search as it looks for the terms we want to combine. OR Expands our search. It looks for any item which contains either or both of the terms we want. NOT Limits search/limits result. Its more precise and saves time AND and NOT are sometimes used as + or _-	Sometimes finding the best information takes a bit more skill than just typing in the space. Steps To find keywords to find database we need planning and arranging. -Group synonyms words together -OR – to group similar terms AND- to connect words together to create a search. This steps saves our search time and improve our results. This is how we search smarter and search faster.	-Searches for words with varying endings. -Searches are broadened. -we need to enter the root word and put truncation symbol* at the end. -Symbols used is * and some alternatives are !, #, $ Examples: sun, sunshine, sunny	-Similar to truncation - it substitutes a symbol for one letter word…generally a ? Example: wom!n= woman, women Colo?r= color, colour

After learning about these web searches and learning how to do it, we will be able to save our search time and also it will improve our result. In this way we will also be able to find relevant information on a topic. It also helps us find spellings and it would be useful while teaching suffix and prefix in English.

If we are to find articles and journals we can use the Google scholar instead of the Google web search. Google Scholar can give us authentic materials and even help with our difficulty by asking the librarian as shown in the video clip. I have used this to do my assignments and I am yet to try the other web searches.

Lastly I would like to share this web search engines to all my colleagues at my school so that they can also use it. We as teachers need to update ourselves with information related to curriculum and others so it will be of great help to all of us.