Imagine you’ve asked a librarian (they do still exist) in bold voice, I’d like to know about\u00a0{insert topic of choice} – She ducks behind the counter pops back up holding a toilet roll\u00a0 – or equivalent lengthy sheet of paper –\u00a0absolutely full of entries.\u00a0 They are the places on any page on any book anywhere that the topic of you choice appears.\u00a0Useless right?\u00a0 What we’d really expect is some librarian sense to cut in there and she’d actually give you a whole book or whole chapter not only on the topic of your choice but in pertinent form to you. Thinking primary school level or PhD here.<\/p>\n
\u00a0But!\u00a0 this toilet roll approach\u00a0is exactly what Google gives you. Millions of entries with no sense of context and rarely any likely hood of educational value or connection to the assignment or project you’ve set or are taking.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 So why do we do that?\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Probably because Google forgot to put “directory” on the front page.\u00a0 It’s hidden away in the depths of the labs section. That’s where all the cool things are in case you haven’t seen it.<\/p>\n
Don’t let students search in the main page of Google unless they have really learned good searching techniques. The Directory\u00a0search is much more forgiving, much more educationally valuable and likely to get them their homework done in half the time and with much better results.<\/p>\n
\u00a0Remember this is good for you to set better assignments and projects too.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Imagine you’ve asked a librarian (they do still exist) in bold voice, I’d like to know about\u00a0{insert topic of choice} – She ducks behind the counter pops back up holding a toilet roll\u00a0 – or equivalent lengthy sheet of paper –\u00a0absolutely full of entries.\u00a0 They are the places on any page on any book anywhere […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[7,10,11],"class_list":["post-8","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general-ramblings","tag-education","tag-google","tag-searching"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/theoldgeezers.photos\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/theoldgeezers.photos\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/theoldgeezers.photos\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theoldgeezers.photos\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theoldgeezers.photos\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=8"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/theoldgeezers.photos\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/theoldgeezers.photos\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=8"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theoldgeezers.photos\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=8"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theoldgeezers.photos\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=8"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}