I’m really excited to share a lesson over the next few days with my 7th grade students about how to make the best use of your search terms. After WEEKS of presenting introductory lessons to the new physical space (new library and it’s layout) and digital space (learning about how to use Schoology) to EVERY student in the school (that’s each lesson 42 times!!), I’m ready to start teaching something different! I asked one of the 7th grade teachers what a relevant topic would be for their students at this time, and she expressed that her students have been struggling when trying to conduct a web search. Guess what they want to do… They just want to type in their question verbatim and they are SHOCKED and CONFUSED when the response they want doesn’t appear in the first page.

So I started looking for lesson plans with ideas on how to teach this. Google has a whole series of lessons about searching, including a beginner lesson on picking the right search terms. Yes please!

I’m excited to have found these lesson resources. There’s so much great stuff out there, and I LOVE when I find something that fits my needs pretty well, which is exactly what happened with this. Apparently there are also “A Google A Day Challenges” that are little lessons created by Google to help students hone their search skills:

I’m definitely going to be sharing these with my teachers, as well as using some during library visits! This is something that our students (and if we’re being honest, many of our teachers) struggle with — and they need our help! Talk about a skill they’re going to need for the rest of their lives, this is definitely one of them!

I’m also going to share this cool infographic I found on Mashable about getting more out of your Google search:

I’m excited to see how these lessons play out. I hope that there will be lots of “Ooooohh, now I get it!” moments from my students this week as we have this discussion.

What tricks and tools do you use to teach your students how to conduct a Google search?