Frequently, I find myself going to Google to solve this or that. – maybe too frequently. Needless to say, I’ve got it down to an art. The question is whether or not spending a few minutes here or there to answer questions like “What was the name of GI Joe’s arch nemesis” and “Who played the dulcimer in Aerosmith’s Pump album” is worth it. You bet it is. Not only has it gained me the answers to some of life’s most troubling questions, but it has also given me a skill that applies to just about anything. Proplem solving and analysis. Let’s break it down and see how it can be used to give our students the skills they need to survive the information overload ahead of them.

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.