Focus Question:
What are search engines and how do they work?
Search engines
retrieve information from the internet. They
can be explored using keywords, which
are words or phrases used by search engines to locate matching Web pages. As shocking as it may seem, because of Google’s
popularity, it has been estimated that less than half of the web is searchable
in Google.
An important part to conducting research is taking notes.
Notestar
offers internet-based electronic note-taking… another option is Office OneNote
2010.
Google has revolutionized how people search today,
compared to the old “crawler” systems that advertisers found ways to trick the algorithms
that ranked sites by keyword indicators.
Today we have search engines that allow us to view in free-text search (shows results that
include 1+ keywords in phrases), Keyword/
exact math search (retrieves only resources that contain exactly the word
or phrase used), Boolean search
(customize search using “or, and, not” to include or exclude keywords).
Tech Tool:
Photo and Audio Resources on the Web
Flickr is an
online photo-sharing tool that can be beneficial to teachers and students. The authority
of the website is easy to find and even a nice help option. This is not an information-based website, but
an image based website. Even though
there is an option to find only CC photos, they cannot prevent people from
uploading photos that are not their own intellectual property. There is no objectivity to be found on this
site either. The website is up-to-date
with a copyright of 2012 and a daily traffic of users. Based on the uses of
AAOCC I give this website a low A because it is hard to monitor plagiarism. Esthetically I am not pleased with the website. It is jumbled, confusing, and has little
direction of how to use it. It was great
for looking photos up but there seems to be a large learning curve for
newcomers who want to contribute images.
 |
| Photo by ** Lucky Cavey ** on Flickr |
Librivox
offers free audio recordings of published books that are in the public domain. The authority and about section can
be found under more info. The accuracy
and objectivity is subjective to the content of what the public domain books
and other materials contain. Dates are
hard to find (if at all) and coverage is minimum. Based off of AAOCC I give
this site a B with lack in currency and coverage.
Summary &
Reflection
The internet has gone through many improvements in the
past decades. Search engines have gone from
“crawler” systems to searches that produce results that are more accurate. I have experienced this growth in search
engines. It would be expected that “regular”
search engines would not produce proper results for children. This causes a lot of work on a teacher’s end. Fortunately,
there are many kid search engines like www.askkids.com,
kids.yahoo.com, and more. I particularly remember using yahoo kids when
I was in middle school and remember having resourceful information for my age
group. Schools have found other ways to
prevent kids from stumbling upon inappropriate information by using filtering
software and partitions. This can
sometimes cause problems though when resourceful websites are blocked.
1 comment:
I like the way you applied the AAOCC criteria to the two tech tools. Interesting to read your comment about Flickr - I've been using for so long that it is second nature to me, but we often forget what it is like to be new to a website and the navigation should not be difficult to be effective!
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