Effective Search Strategies Lesson Plan

PS1, Ed 3508
Alaina
Objectives
-students will demonstrate their ability to use a search engine
-students will describe effective information search through a search engine
-students will describe similarities and differences between peoples and communities in
Canada and in India or Ukraine.

Activities
Introduction

1. Have all the students surround the smart board and bring up Google
2. Explain to students how Google works and that we are going to search about
peoples and communities in Peru
3. Ask the students what kinds of things we should search weather, clothing, food,
cultural traditions, history (example- what kind of food do they eat in Peru?)
a. Look at links that come up
b. Explain to students why this is a lazy search
4. Introduce them to advance search options and search topic in advance search
options
a. Explore key words of the topic
b. Explore topic using quotation marks
c. Refer to Appendix A for more details

Development
1. Have students retrieve computers from cart according to rows/groupings
2. Have students search for Canadian peoples and community
a. Clothing, weather, food, cultural traditions, etc.
3. Have students search for Ukrainian or Indian peoples and communities.
a. Clothing, weather, food, cultural traditions, etc.
4. Have students write 3 pieces of information of each Canadian and other country
example
5. Have students write a 4 sentence reflection on effective internet searching
a. Likes, dislikes, what was effective what wasnt
6. Have students work in groups of 2-3 and share their findings and reflections

Closure
1. Come back together as a whole class and have a few students share their search
findings
2. Have some students share their reflections on Google searching
3. Introduce other search engines that are age appropriate including Kidtopia and
KidRex
4. Have students go back to their computers and access Kahoot
 5. Play a Kahoot quiz game to wrap up effective search strategies as a final
formative assessment

Evaluation
Formative assessment on the paper with their facts and reflection
o Assess their reflections to gage how students felt with effective
information search
Meet with students who expressed difficulty
o Assess that their facts are accurate
Through this, can tell if they used effective search strategies

Formative assessment through Kahoot

o enables assessment right after activity and can meet with students who
answered questions wrong

Appendix A refer to this when explaining effective searches

use nouns as keywords rather than articles (e.g. a, the), pronouns (she, it),
conjunctions (and, or) or prepositions (to, from) in queries
use 6 to 8 keywords per query - try to brainstorm alternative terms
where possible use phrases by using quotation marks, as in "learning theory"
spell carefully, and consider alternative spellings
avoid redundant terms
check the online tutorials of the search engine you're using, since those all have
their own conventions
often searches take persistence and creativity