Middle school students can encounter problems when researching on the web. This can lead to wasting a great deal of time and energy. Here are some tips that should make the job much easier.
1. Spell keywords properly.
2. Choose strong keywords. For example if you were trying to determine what turtles eat, you may want to use turtle and diet as your keywords. Example: If you want to buy a car, don’t enter the keyword “car” if you can enter the keyword “Toyota.” Better still, enter the phrase “Toyota Dealerships” AND the name of the city where you live.
3. More keywords narrow your focus. Poodles black quiet “for sale” will result in fewer hits.
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If you’re interested in the intersection of technology and education - which these days covers a rather large part of education - you might like to check out this new podcast. The host, Jeff Utecht, is a teacher at Shanghai American School, as well as a presenter and IT consultant for schools in the Asia region, but for a number of the episodes - a series of conversational episodes called called SOS (Shifting Our Schools) - he is joined by teachers from various other schools in the region, where they discuss
the latest conversations in the educational blogosphere as well as deep thinking about education and the changing nature of learning.
This is highly relevant material for international school teachers and administrators, and the latest episode is from the EARCOS conference just the other week, where Jeff was one of the presenters.
To subscribe with iTunes, click here: 
If, on the other hand, you don’t want to use iTunes, you can also just go to the site itself (http://www.thethinkingstick.com/ondeck/archivepage/) and browse the links there to download individual episodes or recorded conference presentations or conversations to your computer and listen to in Media Player.
Way back in October, I wrote a blog entry called Web Searching 101, outlining some basic web searching tricks using Google, but mentioned that some techniques work better with other search engines, for example AltaVista, and I promised to write a follow-up, Web Searching 201. Better late than never, so here goes…
A simple Google search may appear to give you the most relevant hits first, but that is not necessarily the case. A number of techniques can be used to (artificially) improve a site’s page rank, i.e. how high on the list of hits it appears. For companies with an online presence, getting a high page rank has enormous potential to increase traffic to their site and thus (hopefully) boost their business. Not surprisingly, SEOs (Search Engine Optimizers) are in high demand these days.
Most often, when Internet users do a web search, they just choose one of the first few links that appear and don’t even bother going to the second page of hits. In some cases that’s fine, but they should be aware that a carefully crafted search algorithm has determined the order of the results you get, thus the results necessarily contain a certain bias.
All Internet users will benefit from learning how to formulate search criteria to target their search more carefully, and this is something we all ought teach our students specifically before sending them to the lab to do research.
Here are some powerful ways to get a lot more out of your web search engine. (Note: all these examples are for using the search engine http://www.altavista.com.)
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Here’s a quick update on some planned upgrades for this year and next here at ISM.
If you’re wondering what to expect with regards to hardware setup, improvements, changes or other planned IT initiatives, read on and you will hopefully find answers to some of your questions.
One obvious recent priority has been to find someone to replace Dimax, who left us in February for new (and greener?) pastures. This will hopefully be resolved shortly. In the meantime, please bear with us as we try to fill his shoes.
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As part of 5th grade’s unit ‘Why Should I Care about the Environment?‘, students were asked to take action in some personal way. To model this behavior (as good teachers do), Jen has made a personal pledge to stop using paper coffee cups, and has started a blog chronicling this process: Cutting Coffee Cups Out of My Life.
She approached the Allegro staff with a suggestion to give a price incentive to encourage everyone to bring their own mugs rather than buying paper cups, and regular coffee buyers may have already noticed that the staff are currently doing data gathering, writing down every time someone brings their own mug.
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Over the last few months, the strike of the Writers Guild of America has led to a significant shift in viewership from TV to online media, as more and more people got fed up with re-runs of old series. Blogs, podcasts and video sharing sites are among the online media outlets benefitting from the TV exodus.
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What is Social Networking?
Many of our students are members of MySpace. MySpace is a social networking site that offers users a personalized page that can contain photos, videos and personal information about themselves. Students can connect with peers and set up their own online networks of friends. The site has privacy settings that allow users to moderate who can access their site. The minimum age requirement to sign up for a MySpace site is 14, although it is possible that a younger student could sign up and enter a false age.
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Here’s a list of ways to save time when using Microsoft Word (and many of the hints work for other Office programs as well). If you spend a little bit of time practicing and learn by heart a number of these keyboard shortcuts, you can significantly increase your efficiency working with Office programs (and Windows in general), as you don’t have to move your hands off the keyboard to click with the mouse the whole time.
How many of these tips and tricks do you know?
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Back in September, I wrote a bit about podcasting at ISM. In the months since, podcasting has really started to take off in the middle and high schools. During the last couple of months, a number of HS English classes, all the 8th graders and a number of 6th graders have started podcasting projects using www.podbean.com.
For an example, listen to this episode (from Dave Feren’s IB class podcast) featuring a fictional radio program called “Good Morning, Afghanistan”. The purpose of this podcast was to creatively show an awareness of some significant aspect of the historical context for the novel The Kite Runner.
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ISM’s Pre K - 12 technology standards will be based on the NETS standards from ISTE, and we are currently in the process of formulating indicators for the standards. As the school gets standards in place for the various subject areas and departments start entering units into Atlas Rubicon, all teachers will need to become more familiar with the NETS standards, as meeting these will require some integration of technology use in other subjects.
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