Firstly, Google is not magic. It will not answer every question you feed it. Though we sometimes wish it did. The results we get are the pages that have the most hyperlinks from other pages that contain the keywords in the search that you provided. (Google has some pretty strange and mysterious ways of deciding the true ranking of search of results, but links from other pages is still king)

Secondly, because people realize that links are king when it comes to search engine ranking, they often work it in their favor. Sometimes this provides you with exactly what you are looking for. Other times it gives you pages of junk. Do your students have the skill to find the correct answer to their questions amidst a sea of junk? They can if they use proper problem solving and analysis.

Fine tuning a student’s technique for problem solving can take time, and to do this it will take stopping them from just typing anything in, and then taking the first result as gold. It’s good to remember that they have grown up around this technology, and slowing them down by asking them to think it through will often give you some interesting remarks from the student.

Let’s look at what should happen.

Step 1 – DO NOT just start typing whatever into that google box. Take a minute to figure out what you already know.

What keywords do you already know about the topic that might be found on the same page as what you are looking for such as names, dates, technical details, etc…?

How might the answer be stated by a reference on the internet? Can you feed part of the answer in as the search?

What don’t you want in the search results? If you are looking for information on music, popular sites selling mp3s will probably appear long before the information that you really need. Use the minus sign before words that you do not want to appear. Try searching the keyword “music” in google. Look at the results. Then try “music -mp3 -radio -videos”. Notice the difference.It removes pages with where those keywords appear.

Other tricks to narrow your search include; using quotation marks around words to find results with only certain words paired together, using the advanced search option and narrow by how recently something was published, and using define:keyword to find definitions. Other tricks can be found here.

Step 2 Did you find what you were looking for? If yes, skip to Step 3.  If no…

Did you learn anything new that would help you narrow your results for another search. Things like other names, proper names or technical terms, alternate names, dates, words related to your search but not your answer?

Should you add or remove terms from your search? Try another one of the tricks listed above?

Step 3 You found an answer, but is it the right one?

Anyone can publish a website these days. And just because they answer your question, it doesn’t mean that it is right.

Who wrote it?

What is the context of the answer? Is it from a help site like this one? Was it in a forum? Was it in something like Wikipedia which can be edited by anyone at anytime? A quick note about Wikipedia. Being cited in Wikipedia doesn’t mean that it is write or WRONG. The site gets bashed quite frequently, and while some answers aren’t answered well there, some are. It should NEVER be a primary source. Actually, you should never settle with the first answer.Find many that state different sides, and are from various types of sources.

Answer questions like “This person knows what they are talking about because”.

Step 4 Keep looking

A couple answers are never good enough. You may get lucky and find the correct answer the first time, but that won’t help you next time. Find several answers. Weigh the merits of their sources. Justify, defend, and compare both sides of every issue. There is ALWAYS at least two sides. Some true answers may not even exist.

Only after finding many answer will a student truly learn to use their judgment. Otherwise they are just working out their brains without any weights. Teachers, should be assigning students to do more than just find an answer to many questions. That’s easy. Make them find many answers to one question, and then make them use their brains to figure out what makes one better than other.

After the brain takes in a new fact, a period of decay begins to happen. Not that the information fades away, but that the brain begins to lose connection with that fact. (The article points out that facts never really disappear, they just become extremely hard to resurface.) The algorithm focuses on reminding the brain after a period of a few days the first time, and then a longer period of time  before it reminds it again. Each time getting longer between reminders. The thought being that each time the brain is reminded the rate of decay decreases. This slower rate of decay allows for more time before the brain needs to be reminded again. The whole point being that there is an optimal time for these reminders to happen,

Lets compare this to another bodily organ.. the stomach. We’ll look at a couple of scenarios.

Person 1 eats regularly. Each day they eat a set of hearty meals. The body’s metabolism recognizes this pattern and speeds up. It figures that since there is plenty of food, it doesn’t have to keep it as long and begins burning it quickly. After a while the body just begins to expect it until one day, it stops. Person 1 decides not to eat that day. The body is still in the habit of burning off the food quickly and never realized that it would ever need to go longer than a day without nourishment.

Person 2 will also cut back their intake, but let’s say they do it intervals. Each interval goes longer and longer between meals. The body realizes this pattern and slows way down. It doesn’t expect food as often and will begin slowing the rate at which it gets rid of it.

Now imagine if thoughts were burned like calories. If the intake is constantly plentiful, it will assume that it can discard the intake quicker. If the intake is spaced out, it will be retained longer.

When applied to a school setting, the results are very interesting. When we teach units, the brain is used to constantly being fed similar ideas. Since it gets these facts regularly, there is no need to hold on to it very long. Realize why students can’t seem to remember the previous unit once you move on to something else? It’s because the brain didn’t realize it would have to retain that unit’s information longer than a day.

Thoughts on this algorithim’s effect in the classroom setting? Leave them in the comments.

As a teacher working in a computer lab, J became the goto guy for all types of questions about technology. He took these questions and turned them into a service for teachers to help train them to be more fluent with those machines that sit on the their desks. The service is based on 180 short emails(one for each day of the school year) that answer these questions posed by  teachers. They provide quick painless training for topics covering hardware, software, and other general use situations. I could imagine that schools wishing to better train their teachers on how to use their machines could benefit a lot from these lessons, especially since they don’t require any more than 5 or so minutes a day. (Something that is a lot better than the after-school PD alternative.) As a matter of fact, it fits our School Improvement Plan quite well.

Here is a short description taken from his site.

180TechTips.com offers 15 hours of free computer training in 180 easy to follow 5 minute lessons.  This isn’t a boring 15 hour lecture.  We aren’t going to lock you in a computer lab for 2 days of ineffective staff development training that leaves you more confused than you were when you started.  This is the kind of relevant and uncomplicated computer training everyone needs.

You can check out the list of tips offered and check them out one by one, or by signing up for the daily email. Signing up, is easy, free, and with no strings attached. You can visit the site at 180techtips.com.

If you haven’t tried their free trial to give their movies a spin, I recommend signing up. Also, a reminder that they provide our readers a free extended preview of 30 days when you enter the code “TEACHERTECH”.

How are you using Brainpop? Leave it in the comments.

Their tips section have everything from “5 Tips to Increase Recall”, to “How to Increase Intrinsic Motivation”. They also have some pop quizzes for teachers to help you find your “ruts”. Check ‘em out here.