Power Searching with Google – Class 1
I struggle each year with how to help my students to understand and use web searching to most effectively find what they need. I have used many of the resources at Google Search Education but haven’t been completely happy with what I’m doing. I saw that Google was offering an online course called Power Searching with Google and I immediately signed up to see how the experts would approach this.
Today, July 10, 2012, the first class became available online. I really like the approach of a short video followed by an activity to practice what was taught and then another video and another activity, etc. I’ll definitely be adapting this next year in the Computer Lab. I am also enjoying the interactions in the forum and think I’ll have some kind of back channel available when I’m doing this in the lab so students can talk to and help one another if they get stuck.
Some things I wondered about:
- Why did Daniel Russell start with filtering images by color and not with how search works?
- How do I get my students to stop asking questions when searching on Google when Google is getting better and better at interpreting these and giving them the correct answer? Interestingly, in the example during the class, the question returned less results than using just the keywords.
- Why is this answer wrong? The video says that adjacent words do result in a higher ranking so shouldn’t this be true? If it is true, I hope the activity gets fixed. If it’s really not true, then I need to be analyzing the questions more closely.
- Why didn’t the video in Lesson 6 include how Internet Explorer handles CTRL/CMD+F? I was amused it wasn’t mentioned but there are still quite a few people using that browser.
- Will we find out how we did on the Pre-Class Assessment?
I am enjoying the experience so far and am looking forward to what Class 2 will bring. Are you taking this online class? What did you think of Class 1? If you’re not taking the class and you’re interested in doing so, you can still register for it at http://www.powersearchingwithgoogle.com/ until (I believe) July 16th.