Making the Internet Smaller

It’s been, once again, crazy busy, so I’m going to get out a quick post here, because I just haven’t had time to finish any of the longer ones.

I did a session at the CLTA Quest for Proficiency in March called “Search Faster and Smarter for #authres.” I highlighted a super underused feature in Google called the Custom Search Engine.  Here’s how it works- basically you create your own search engine page that looks like a regular Google Search page, but, and here’s the brilliant part: it searches only the pages you have pre-selected.

The Why

A lot of times you might want students to go out and search for things on the Internet, but the Internet is a big place and so you as a teacher can still give them the practice of search and making judgements about which pages to look at, while at the same time restricting the amount of extraneous incomprehensible nonsense they might have to wade through in order to accomplish a task.

Here’s a quick video that walks your through how to do this.

If you didn’t make it to the CLTA Quest for Proficiency – here’s the link to the slide show.  (The only thing it’s missing is that we did all of the searching about the Tour de France because it is the greatest sport in the world and the only reason to get out of bed in July. 🙂 )