Module 5: Searching

Unfortunately, I can only log onto this course at the weekends due to my thousands of responsibilities during the working week. I really feel upset and anxious about this when I see that my friends are ahead of me as some of them find time to log in during the week. Anyway.....

Yes, this was another useful module..... I became aware of and familiar with searching tips I was not aware of and was not using before..... Wildcards, using quotation marks for exact words and phrases, cutting down on redundancies, limiting your search to time periods, and many more.....

Also, I did not use any other search engines other than Google. I am sure I'll be using these 3 a lot (www.ask.com, www.dogpile.com, www.metacrawler.com) as two of them are meta-search engines that search multiple-search engines.

The most useful part have been evaluating the validity and reliability of websites while searching section. I will be using these 6 questions when I am searching for something and when my students are searching for something on the Internet:

1. Who has written the website?

2. Why has the author written this?

3. What is it about? Is it factual?

4. Where does the information come from? Do the links provided go out to other websites?

5. When was the site last updated?

6. How good is the information?

And I'll be reminding myself as well as my students and my friends that we should validate and check a website, and should not believe everything we see on the Internet, and ask some key questions before we decide that the website and the information is reliable.