ICT

Year 5 and 6 Film Making Day
Pass It On Blog - Check out our contribution to this national pass-it-on blog about the environment.

Term 2 Week 1:
Make a page called 'ICT' toc WALT refine our researching skills. **Smart Keyword Searching**

Just think! Every major search engine has information about millions and millions of World Wide Web sites. At the click of a button, a search engine sorts through what it "knows" and lists the sites it "thinks" you want. In some ways, a search engine is like a well-trained dog. It will fetch what you want, but only if you use the right commands.

__More Words Are Better...__ While single words are better commands for dogs, more words are better for search engines. A search for a single word may “fetch” a million sites. Obviously, it’s tough to check a million sites to find the best one for your needs. Adding more words fetches fewer sites that are closer to what you need. See how it works now.

Commonsense Media - click on the purple diamond Scroll down to __Investigating Search Engines and Directories__ Click on one of the search engines to complete the following:

Copy and paste this section onto your ICT page:

1. Which search site are you using? Let’s say your teacher tells you to find out __whether the element mercury is toxic__. 2. Start by typing in __mercury__ and hitting the enter key. 3. How many Web pages were found? 4. Look over the description of the first few sites. What are they about? By now you may realize that the word mercury has more than one meaning. 5. Try adding another word to tell what about mercury really interests you. 6. Type in __mercury__ __element__. 7. How many Web pages were found? 8. Look over the description of the first few sites. What are they about? Although these sites might have the answer to your question, they might not. 9. Now try adding a third word. Type in mercury element toxic. 10. How many Web pages were found? 11. Look over the description of the first few sites. What are they about? Now you are getting somewhere! By now all the sites retrieved should help answer the question.

Looking at the Numbers 12. Compare the number of Web pages found for the three searches. What do they tell you about how the search engine does its work?

Use Synonyms (a word that means the same as another word)

Let's say you want to find out about living on the planet Mars. You think your keywords should be __planet__ __Mars__ __living__. 13. Put those three words to the search site. 14. How many Web pages were found? 15. Look over the description of the first few sites. What are they about Now think of synonyms for each keyword. Well, a planet is a planet. Mars is Mars. But other words might work just as well as living, such as coloninzing. 16. Put in planet Mars colonizing to the search site. 17.How many Web pages were found? 18. Look over the description of the first few sites. What are they about?