NCTM National Conference San Francisco, CA April 24, 1999

Smart Searching. The biggest mistake that I have ever made using the web with students was asking a class to do a random search to find web resources related to their science fair projects. As you may suspect, this ended in total frustration for all of us. Imagine going into a huge library where the librarian has scrambled up all the books, magazines, jounals, encyclopedia, etc. that contain a particular word. Any searching can take a lot of time, but with some planning, student searching can be much more effective.

Locating materials that you can really use takes an incredible amount of time. Read from The New York Times, April 7, 1999, Textbook Publishers Extend Lessons Online By PAMELA MENDELS

Finally, teachers are seeking ways to use the computers in their classrooms -- without wasting time conducting endless Web searches for the right materials. Indeed, publishers are finding that locating appropriate sites and keeping links up-to-date are not easy tasks. Kelly D. Duckett, a biology major at Juniata College in Huntingdon, Pa., is one of about 25 college students at four universities who does an initial search for Web sites for SciLinks.

She spends about five hours a week searching the Web for good features, and for every 50 or 60 sites she looks at, Duckett says she finds only one that makes the grade. The list of sites she compiles is then reviewed by several other people, including a teacher and an expert in the discipline being studied. A site can be rejected for a number of reasons, like being factually wrong, containing advertising or lacking visual appeal.

Almost all of my searching is for mathematics topics, so I start at the Math Forum. Their search engine produces a moderated search since the Forum folks have reviewed the sites that they have listed on their site. In addition, from either the main search page or the results page you can send your keywords to Eisenhower National Clearinghouse or one of the major Internet search engines including: AltaVista, MetaCrawler, Yahoo, and DejaNews.

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These pages were developed through GirlTECH, a teacher training and student project program sponsored by the Center for Research on Parallel Computation (CRPC), a National Science Foundation Science and Technology Center. Copyright 1999 Cynthia Lanius