VicPLN Assignment 5 – Effective Searching

Effective web searching is a fundamental skill that teachers often assume students have completely mastered in primary school.  My experience has been that even in Year 12, students’ search skills can be improved through the explicit teaching of the development of effective search strings and the exploration of the many features of Google.

I have also experimented today with the alternative search engines listed in course.  I felt that duckduckgo and Bing were not as effective as Google.  Instagrok, however, looks to have great potential – I am particularly impressed with Instagrok’s ability to share a search string, through a variety of methods including Facebook, Twitter and Pinterest, and the graphical representation of the search result as shown below:

Driver Fatigue Research Effect On Driving | Learn about Driver Fatigue Research Effect On Driving on instaGrok, the research engine

A trusted web resource

http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/maney/nns/2011/00000014/00000003/art00001

Following from the search I conducted above using Instagrok, which relates to the impact of driver fatigue on safe driving, the link above is to a journal article that I located through a Google Scholar search.  I believe that this article is reliable because:

1. I conducted a search on the journal (Nutritional Neuroscience) and found that it has been published for 16 years.
2. The journal is based at the University of Texas – I believe that university based publications have a higher likelihood of reliability than non-university based articles.
3. I conducted a search on the main findings of this article (it was related to the effects of caffeine) and found many other articles that corroborated the findings of this paper.

In addition to learning some useful new search techniques, I also had an “ah ha” moment with my blog which I have now reorganised so that my posts are more sensible.  I will leave the other posts that I have made today on the PLN page (which is correct for the links I sent earlier today) but I will send the correct link for Assignment 5.  I have now also added tags to the correctly posted earlier assignments.