It used to be that if the teacher didn’t know something, and we couldn’t find it in the adopted textbook, there wasn’t much else to be done. I mean, you could go to the library, or try to find an article someplace, but it was difficult and time consuming and unless the question was extremely compelling, it just wasn’t worth the effort to us (the students). But times have changed…

In this day and age, teachers are no longer “Founts of Wisdom” as they once were; textbooks are not the only place for information on a subject (in fact, many classrooms don’t even use the adopted textbook anymore). Today’s students have more tools at their disposal for getting information. That being said, most students really only use one tool: Google.

Most of the time when students ask me a question, I answer with a question. One of my goals as a teacher is to foster independent learning. My usual go to is, “How could you find that out for yourself?” I want students to know how to find information on their own, and not rely on me to provide it. That’s not to say I don’t answer some of their questions. In particular, if there is a feature of the language that we are not fully taking advantage of to keep things simple, I will often just answer their question. When asked, students inevitably respond, “I can Google it.” With some topics, Google is pretty straight forward. But with technical things (like programming) students often aren’t sure what they should use as their search terms. They also have difficulty narrowing down or eliminating irrelevant information from the Google results.

Using Google (or any search engine for that matter) is a learned skill. I think most teachers are pretty good at it because we are used to searching for information by key word or concept, and then iterating on that search to hone down the results to what we think might be useful. However, we tend to take for granted that students will be able to effectively use Google to find what they’re looking for.

No one taught me how to use search engines. I was around in the bad old days of search engines like Lycos, Webcrawler, and Alta Vista. Using these search engines required using logical operators in order to get useful results. While Google has made searching much easier (generally Google is pretty good at guessing what you’re looking for), finding useful results for programming often requires multiple searches, with slight modifications in the searched words or phrase based on the returned results. This iterative process of searching requires some patience and the ability to determine relevancy of the search results quickly. When you’re new to a topic, that second point can be difficult. The best way to improve that is with practice and experience. These things take time but we often don’t give ample time to develop them.

I think this year, I’m going to spend a little bit of time (maybe a week before we get into programming) having students develop their “Googling” skills. I’m not 100% sure what that’s going to look like right now, but I came across this page with lesson plans from Google on improving search engine use. I haven’t had a chance to look closely at the lessons, but at a glance they seem promising.

What is your approach to teaching students to use search engines?