Tuesday, January 6, 2009

Please don't Google search!

One of our teams is starting a big project on Africa. Each student chose a country to research and will create a product (brochure, flyer, etc.) with a travel itinerary. It's an okay project, giving kids the chance to hone their research skills and some autonomy and creativity in choice of product and presentation.

Today was their first day in the media center. Today you CANNOT do a Google search!

Why is it that folks see Google as the be-all-end-all in the cyberworld search?! Yes, it is an intuitive search engine for the most part, finding the most likely hit for which I'm looking. But then I use pretty good search terms with some boolean search strings, too. Most of our kids aren't that savvy....yet.

But they are getting more savvy. They were able to tell me some specific websites that they might visit to find factual information. Imagine that?! Facts! Most ended up pulling up the CIA World Factbook for their country overviews. Nice place to start, guys.

But don't forget the books! The kids need to include their country's flag in their final product. We have a whole set of books, Flags of the World, that includes color images of the flags and a few facts about the country. I also directed kids to Junior Worldmark's Nations of the World. And we actually have about 60 books on various African nations.

It was a good day not to Google!

No comments: