Google Custom Search Refines Research Skills

If you type in “king snake” to Google’s regular search engine, you’ll find about 12.4 million hits, and not all of them focus on the reptile. That’s a problem for educators who want to teach their students how to research online, but they’re addressing it by creating Google custom search engines. 

Last year, Darcy Sanderson set up a wiki on animals for the science teachers at J.T. Henley Middle School in Virginia. She came up with a list of five to seven good animal Web pages for the engine so that the kids could zero in on reliable sites that gave them the information they needed, said Sanderson, who worked as a curriculum and technology integration partner as well as an algebra teacher at the time.

“I think it helped them in the long run,” Sanderson said, “and if we hadn’t done that, I think the searching would have been a much more tedious and a longer process.”

The animal custom search engine allowed kids to research on quality sites without spending six hours learning how to evaluate them, which thrilled parents such as Melissa Techman, whose daughter used it in her class.

“Once you explain to teachers and parents what it is, they love it, because it’s almost like training wheels for researchers,” Techman said. “They’re getting the good research experience, but they’re not spending a lot of time looking for sources.”

As the technology lead teacher and librarian for Broadus Wood Elementary School, Techman wants to create a fifth-grade tech squad this year that will work with her on lunch breaks a few times a week to build custom searches that they can share with their classes.

At Chocowinity Primary School in North Carolina, fourth-grade teacher Kelly Hines plans to set up a custom search engine this year so that her students won’t get bogged down by Web sites that are too advanced in vocabulary and context.

“When we study magnetism and electricity or animal habitats, we’ll be able to kind of just narrow the focus of what they are researching and make the Internet a more manageable place for them to navigate,” Hines said.

Search engines create safe, quality learning experiences

Custom searches help students become better researchers, and they act as a scaffold to weed out some of the irrelevant and inappropriate information, said Lucy Gray, a technology integration specialist at the Center for Elementary Math and Science Education at the University of Chicago.

“There’s a mentality around effective searching that has to be taught kindergarten through 12th grade,” Gray said. “It’s not something that you just do one lesson on and then everybody’s good on search. There’s a lot of critical thinking that goes into being an effective searcher.”