Activity 6:  Evaluation Instrument

Pre-Activity

Locate the address or URL of this webpage which is found in the locator box at the top of the page.  Can you identify the domain? 

Did you know that when you move your mouse over a hotlink on a webpage, the URL of that link appears at the bottom of the page.  By looking at the URL you know something about the site before you go there. 

In the address below, what does the ~ (tilde) mean?

http://pubweb.acns.nwu.edu/~abutz/di/dc/camps.html

Think of the Internet as a huge unorganized collection of books, documents, articles, music, graphics, any type of information resource you can think of.  Information resources are added continually.  There is not one server, but multitudes of servers.

Activity 6:  Search Engines

Once you decide to begin searching the web, you should know a little about search engines, web addresses, and how the Internet is used by others.

• A search engine organizes parts of the Internet so that information can be located.  No single search engine accesses the entire Internet, but some, like Google, do a better job than others. 
• The address of the website you find using the search engine tells you who sponsored the site.
  .gov (a government agency)
  .org (an organization)
  .com (a commercial site)
  .net (similar to .com)
  .edu (and educational site)
• You will learn to discriminate relevant articles from irrelevant information by scanning citations in the returned list of hits. 
• You will learn to separate advertising from information.  You, the researcher, must be able to distinguish between and information searching box and an advertising box.

• Reminder:  You signed a technology agreement at the beginning of the school year which holds you accountable for your computer and Internet activities.  It is important to know that your surfing on the Internet can be tracked by employers, school web managers, advertisers, etc.  For you, the web user, this means:
• Staying on task.  Employers have been known to fire employees for inappropriate searching on the web; school staff may pull your technology privileges.
• Knowing that your searches are providing information which will prompt advertising to appear.
• Guarding your personal information.
• NOTE:  our district employs a filtering service which blocks inappropriate sites.  If you accidentally stumble across a site which you believe should be blocked, please advise any library staff member.  If you deliberately search for inappropriate sites, your search may be tracked and you may lose your technology privileges.

You are now ready to begin your activity

Many first-time internet users immediately try GOOGLE. This assignment allows you to experience other search engines such as the ones listed below.

1. Use your keyword search strategy in one of these search engines
   Ask allows the search to be entered as a keyword search or in "natural language".
   BING and YAHOO! find and organize the answers you need so you can make faster, more informed decisions.
   DuckDuckGo is interested in user privacy.
   Dogpile and MetaCrawler are metasearch engines that return all the best results from leading search engines including Google, Yahoo!, Bing, and Ask.
2. Each student will locate one article from one of the above search engines.
3. Complete the evaluation worksheets for the article.
4. Highlight a small portion of the article that supports your research, avoiding advertisements, then go to the print icon (CTRL + P) and click on the dot under Page Range to Selection, not All.  Print only the selected information.
5. Using EasyBib, create a citation (MLA 8) for a website. Fill in all the information before creating the citation.

You are now ready to move on to Activity 7:  Completing the Research