How Do You Search?

[mwallace]

Hello everyone,

I'm on the hunt for ideas...we are currently looking at ways we can make searching for resources much easier for teachers. I know that it's really frustrating spending time looking for content for your lesson, but you can't seem to get the right results back from your search, or it takes you ages to find what you want, or the results that are returned aren't obvious, or there's far too many of them...etc.

So, over to you - what are the ingredients of a good search tool? What do you use in the 'real world' that just works? What really gets your goat? How do you look for things? What do teachers *really* need, and what is just superfluous?

All answers very gratefully received, and will be loaded into our big ideas hopper in the lab.

Many thanks everyone.

Mary

[excelteacher]

I'm not sure if this will help, but when I do a search on any of the search engines, I type in the concept a "+" and the words "lesson plans". For example, if I am looking for lesson plans on simple machines, I type in "simple machines + lesson plans" (without the quotation marks:)). I get more reliable results than just typing in the concept.

[DavidFhu]

I will recommend to introduce Google Search Engine into Promethean Planet. I will help in get the correct information.

If not, we can get volunteers to read each resource and label the correct keyword to it. At least, we don't need to spend money to get a staff sit in front the computer to read the resource and key in the keyword that we will never search.