During last week’s episode of Two Ed Tech Guys Take Questions and Share Cool Stuff I shared a little story from earlier that day in my classroom. The story provides a good reminder of why we should review search strategies every fall even if we think our students “have done it before.” 

Here’s the story, one of my comp sci students was looking for an image to use in a little project that he’s working on. I told the class to use Pixabay or Unsplash to find the images they needed. Unfortunately for this student there really wasn’t an image that met his needs available on either of those sites. So I told him he could look on Google Images if he refined the search according to usage rights. Seeing how that could be done was his first “whoa!” moment. The second “whoa!” came a few minutes later when I showed him that he could refine the search according to file type to find PNG files without having to manually look through the results. His third “whoa!” was let out when he realized that he could search by file type to find PowerPoint presentations. 

This particular student is new to my classroom, but is not new to the school district as he is a junior this year. So while I’m sure he was taught how to search by file type and usage rights in the past, he clearly benefitted from a refresher last week. The lesson here is to review search strategies with students even if you think they’ve heard it before. 

For more information on teaching search strategies to students of all ages, take a look at my online course Ten Search Strategies Students Need to Know.