Simply typing “River” into Google Search isn’t necessarily going to return learning resources to help you with your Geography home learning project.
There are a number of ways that can help students to improve the accuracy of returns in web searches:
- If you're looking for child-friendly resources and information, try adding “+kids+facts” to the search term, this will help return results that are geared more towards young users
- A child-friendly safe search engine such as Swiggle, a website aimed at Key Stage 2 learners, that also includes links to a wealth of learning and online safety resources.
- Watch out for spelling errors, these can lead you to material that you weren’t looking for
- Choose effective keywords, think about the most important words you want the search result to return
- Use the minus sign (-) to eliminate irrelevant results. There must be a space before the minus sign but not between the minus sign and the word you want to eliminate for example: horse -fence
- Use quotes to search for a phrase. Quotes glue words together; there can be additional words before or after the phrase, but the phrase will always stay together in the search results for example: Book “I must survive. I have promises to keep.”
- Use Google Advanced Search, particularly helpful when searching for a specific image. You can filter results by different categories including line size, colour, type, usage rights etc.
- Check that your students know how to store and organise their favourites – this will save them time when they want to return to helpful sites at a later date.
