||| Search Engines |||

There are some excellent search engines that have been developed for educational use. These search engines have already sifted sites that are appropriate for student use so therefore may be limited in scope, but you can be assured that the sites found by your classes are focused only on appropriate web pages for educational use.

Here are some tips to do before asking your students to search for information:

• Brainstorm with your students on what information they already know about rocks and list them on large sheets of butcher paper.
• Discuss what they would like to learn about rocks, then fine tune these new topics to specific areas. When searching for information, your students may need to either broaden their topic to find appropriate material or they may need to refine their search if they generate too many sites to view.
• Students need specific goals that they need to achieve when searching for information. As they search for information, they should have a goal for sharing this information with the class. Discuss with your students how they will share the information that they have found. Ideas for sharing their work may include having them work in small, collaborative groups according to topics, and create a poster board or other graphic demonstration of their knowledge.
• Tell the students how you will evaluate their work. You can discuss as a class what kind of rubrics for scoring you will use to grade their work. Students should be involved with the scoring of each other's projects. You could even take two grades for the projects developed: one that was graded by the students and one that was graded by yourself. Fifty percent of the grade could be given by the students and fifty percent could be given by you.

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