How to find useful websites

As already mentioned, the Internet is a vast repository of information and resources, and it is perhaps exactly this range that makes it seem, at first, daunting and unapproachable to most teachers. In the following two sections we take a look at how to find and evaluate resources for use in class.

The ability to search through Internet content, and quickly and efficiently find suitable resources is perhaps the most underrated, and yet most useful, skill that both teachers and learners can acquire.

For teachers, having good search skills means finding useful resources quickly, speeding up lesson planning and facilitating web use in class. For learners, it means being able to quickly accomplish web-based tasks, thus ensuring that the technology enhances the learning experience rather than impeding it. It makes sense, then, both to acquire these skills, and to spend some time sharing them with your learners.

There are three basic ways of searching on the Internet, and we will briefly describe them below, and look at ways of making searches more targeted and efficient.

Search engines

Although there is a large variety of search engines, perhaps the most well-known is Google (www.google.com), which currently indexes over twelve billion web pages.

A search engine is almost directly analogous to a telephone directory, or any other database of stored information. You search for a name or a title, and the directory gives you more information about that entry. But with over twelve billion pages to choose from, it's not quite as easy to use as a phone directory. So how do you find exactly what you want? The answer comes in knowing what kind of information Google actually has on each web page that it indexes. What Google knows about a page is generally the page address on the web, the page title, when it was last updated and a few keywords associated with the content itself. These keywords are defined by the designer of the page, and can reasonably be expected to accurately reflect the content of the page. The key to good searching in Google is to define your keywords properly. The other technique which you may find useful is to use the 'phrase' search technique which involves wrapping part of a phrase in inverted commas, thus ensuring that Google will treat the words not as individual entities, but will actually look for sentences on web pages which contain those words in that particular order.

Thus, instead of searching for cheap hotel in Rome, which can search for any or all of these words, in any position and order, on a page, try searching for "cheap hotel in Rome" as part of a phrase you might expect to find on a web page.

To elaborate on our example above, "Barcelona Olympics marathon" returns only twelve pages, since the likelihood of these three words being on a web page in this exact order is significantly smaller than the chance of the words being on a page separately in any position.

This technique is particularly useful for finding song lyrics, where searching for "I never meant to cause you trouble" will return 11,800 results, with the first result being the lyrics of the Coldplay song, whereas a search for Coldplay lyrics will give you access to 7,640,000 websites, but you will have to visit each one to see if that particular song lyric is there.

The ultimate trick with Google is to try to imagine the web page you are looking for, and then try to visualise the content that is on this ideal page. This technique will help you decide on exactly what to search for.

In our next example, one learner is doing a project on the singer, Shakira, and needs some biographical information. Searching for Shakira on Google returns 43,200,000 pages. But how exactly would biographical information be presented on a website? Perhaps a search for "Shakira was born in" would be more useful, since the only possible information which could follow such a phrase would be a location or a date. This search returns 266 results, with the first few all leading to biographies of the singer.

Subject guides

Yahoo! (www.yahoo.com) currently claims to index nearly twenty billion pages, and is still the search venue of choice for many people who remember when it was the only way of searching the Internet. The approach here is slightly different in that Yahoo! was never intended as a keyword search engine, but rather as a way of browsing titles. Whereas Google might be likened to a telephone directory, a more familiar metaphor for Yahoo! would be that of the library, where users have a notion of what they are looking for, but not necessarily the exact title. So, in that sense, we are invited to browse, to wander around, rather than directly key in search terms or words we are interested in exploring.

Yahoo! derives its description of subject guide from the fact that it divides its content into subject areas, and subdivisions of those areas. Instead of a keyword search from the main page, users browse the section which best reflects their interests, and then search.

Using Yahoo! to find our biographical information about Shakira, we would access the Yahoo! directory by clicking on the more dropdown list at the top of the Yahoo! main page and choose Directory. From there we can browse to Shakira: click on Entertainment, then Music then Artists, and finally search for Shakira biography, making sure to select the this category option. What this essentially means is that Yahoo! will only search in 'Entertainment - Music - Artists' rather than in its entire directory. This yields six results, shown below, all of which lead to biographies of the singer.

It is worth noting that Yahoo! search results can often be more accurate than Google results as they tend to lead searchers to the first page of a website, rather than dropping them indiscriminately into the middle, where the chances of confusion are higher.

Real language searches

A real language search such as Ask (www.ask.com) allows the user to type simple questions as search queries. Thus our learner who is investigating the life and times of Shakira types something along the lines of When was Shakira born? instead of a selection of appropriate keywords. Note that the website does not actually analyse or indeed understand the question itself, but rather selects the keywords from the query ('when', 'Shakira', 'born') and constructs a search based on them.

A search on Ask should give you a results page with the answer to your question at the top (where Ask has been able to find a direct answer), and links to relevant sites below that.

Your choice of search facility will depend on how you like to work, and which site you find particularly attractive and useful. However, it is worth taking the time to play with all three and to spend some time exploring them with your learners. Learners can benefit from an exposure to all three types, as they activate different linguistic and mental processes. Keywords are good for exploring word relationships and lexical areas. Subject searches help define and refine ideas and contexts. A real search can provide useful practice in question formation.

A simple way of introducing the topic of searching the Internet in class is to produce a trivia quiz or short 'treasure hunt' type activity for your learners to do. Give them a set of questions and allow them to use all three search pages to find the answers. Make it into a timed quiz, with the first team to finish bringing the activity to an end. Then go over the answers and help them to see how to improve their search skills.

It is at this point that you can examine which search page was used in each case, if it was the appropriate choice, and work together as a group to extrapolate general conclusions about search techniques.

Sample treasure hunt Use your search skills to find this information:

• the name of the president of the World Bank.

• the capital of Scotland.

• the country that won the 1986 FIFA World Cup.

• the author of Of Mice and Men.

• nationality of the architect of 'La Pedrera'.

• the director of the movie North by Northwest.

In this example we can see how a variety of approaches would be possible - and how these might lead to a useful discussion on search skills, as well as some basic language work, on question formation, for example. The first search encourages the use of Google and the 'part of a sentence' approach discussed above, with perhaps the best search term being "is the president of the World Bank", while the second one might work nicely as a real language search, with learners coming up with the question What's the capital of Scotland? The third search involves reformulation to be successful, perhaps Who won the 1986 FIFA World Cup? These are the skills which are the basis of many of the activities you will do on the Internet, so it is worth spending some time refining them and examining them a little more closely.

It is also worth considering specialist sites as a source of information. Teach yourself and your learners to think a little more laterally. For example, any queries related to movies might be better directed to the Internet Movie Database (www.imdb.com) than a search engine. Similarly, book information can be easily found on the Amazon site (www.amazon. com), and football World Cup information on the FIFA site (www.fifa.com).

Variations on this treasure hunt activity include learners then making a quiz for another team to do. They must be able to find the answers themselves before they hand over the task to the other team. Or the whole class could make a quiz for you, the teacher, to do as homework! This can be a highly motivating task for learners, as they pit themselves and their Internet skills against the teacher's.

There are also subject- or media-specific search sites which are worth having a quick look at, though do bear in mind that much of what you find on media search sites will be subject to copyright, so please check the terms of use before including anything in any materials you might make. You might like to try the following to get started:

• http://images.google.com/ - Google image search, allows you to search an enormous collection of images in various formats. A good place to start looking for illustrations for worksheets, teaching materials, projects or presentations.

• http://froogle.google.com/ - Google shopping search, gives you access to comparative shopping results for products. Use this to find products you are interested in, read reviews and find the best prices.

• http://video.search.yahoo.com/ - Yahoo! video search allows you to search a large database of online video material by keyword or category. Ideal if you want to demonstrate something in a more lively way, for music videos and other multimedia classes.

• http://www.altavista.com/video - AltaVista video search works in the same way as the Yahoo! one above, but videos are also classified by different formats, allowing for a range of multimedia players and software to be used to watch them.

• http://www.altavista.com/audio/default - AltaVista audio search gives you access to a large online collection of audio files. Particularly good for searching for the popular MP3 format song files.

• http://search.singingfish.com/sfw/home.jsp - Singing Fish multimedia search, combining both audio and video results in one interface. It has a large collection of sources, and you can search by category, including movies, news, TV, sports and a host of others.

• http://tv.blinkx.com/ - Blinkx TV video search allows you to search popular TV broadcasters like the BBC and CNN for short video clips on a wide variety of subjects. Again, this is an ideal source of news material.

You may also like to try one of the meta search sites. These are sites which search more than one search engine at the same time, giving you, for example, the ability to search Yahoo!, Google and Ask from one single page. Examples include:

http://www.dogpile.com/ - Dogpile.

• http://www.kartoo.com/ - KartOO.

• http://www.mamma.com/ - Mamma.

You will, of course, get far more results than if you simply used one single search engine, but you will also get a sense of balance from a meta search engine, as the results come from a variety of sources using a variety of search techniques. You will tend to get a more rounded view of what is out there on the Internet. Concentrating on the first couple of pages of results will help reduce the potentially overwhelming quantity of data returned.

One final hint: whenever you visit a search engine, be sure to click on the help link to see what hints and tips the site owners recommend for improving your search techniques

How to evaluate websites

Having found potentially useful websites, the next step is to evaluate how useful and appropriate they are for the classroom. You will also need to think about the aims and objectives of your lesson. Does the website you have found fit in with these, and does it enhance and complement the other materials and activities you have planned for the class? Sometimes the Internet content will be the core of a particular lesson but at other times it will merely serve as a jumping-off point into something more closely related to a particular coursebook theme or unit, or be a source of extra material to follow up on the core classroom content. There are various standard criteria for judging websites which can serve as a starting point for your evaluation:

1 Accuracy

• Who wrote the page? Is this person an expert in the subject matter? Check qualifications, experience - look for an 'about me' link.

• Is the page content reliable and factually correct? Cross-reference with other similar websites and encyclopedias.

2 Currency

• Is the content up-to-date?

Check factual information against other reliable sources.

• When was the page last updated?

Check for information at the bottom/top of the page.

3 Content

• Is the site interesting and stimulating?

Consider the content from your learners' point of view.

• Is it attractive and easy to navigate?

Check the colour combinations, the logic of the links and visual structure.

4 Functionality

• Does the site work well? Are there any broken links?

Be sure to check all pages, and follow all links to all pages you intend to use.

• Does it use a lot of large files or alternative technologies (e.g. Flash)?

Check how quickly it loads for learners; check sound, video and animation work. It may well be that the accuracy and currency criteria, both essentially factual, are not of interest to you if you are working on a purely linguistic level, that is planning a class that exploits the language of the site, rather than the content itself. On the other hand, accuracy and currency might be the most important criteria if learners are taking notes and interpreting information in preparation for producing a project.

Another thing to bear in mind as a language teacher will be the linguistic accuracy of the web page. If this is important to you, you will need to add this to your evaluation criteria. This again will depend on the purpose of the site in your lesson plan. This is an area of contention among teachers, and a subject that almost always crops up in technology training sessions. Only you can really decide on the linguistic content of a particular site. Spending lots of time on a site devoted to mobile phone texting language with a class preparing to do an examination is probably not in the best interests of the learners, for example.

As far as content is concerned, note that criteria such as ease-of-use and interest are taken into account, but you may also want to consider adding a further set of criteria here along the lines of appropriateness. In this subcategory you would note which groups or levels the site would be suitable for and any problems you foresee with the site itself.

Functionality will be a category with consequences for all teachers. Not only can it be very frustrating to follow through the content of a site to be met with broken links and missing information, but it can be equally frustrating to wait twenty minutes for a short video to download due to the speed of your connection. Again, careful preparation and investigation in the lesson planning stage can go a long way towards making the learners' experience enjoyable and trouble-free.

However you evaluate the usefulness of the websites you find, make sure that you keep a record of the content and address so that you begin to build up a large stock of evaluated sites.

Date: 2014-12-22; view: 1553