Students as Researchers

Research is becoming more and more prominent within the public schools. Students are asked to research topics for projects and are expected to weed out the good information from the bad. However, most students don't know how to effectively look for information on the internet. When it comes time to research I feel like I'm doing most of the work for the students!

The purpose of my classroom is to support students to become more independent learners. How can I do that if I'm spending most of the time researching and looking for the good websites for them to look through? My students wouldn't even know where to start on their own. After reading the chapter on student researchers in Alan November's Who Owns the Learning?,  I was really intrigued by the Google Custom Search. I thought this could be a good way to allow my students more independence while learning how to research a topic.

It was extremely easy to use! Once the custom search was created all you had to do was add in the website links of sites you wanted to be in your search and voila! I also was able to go back and add more links after I had created the custom search. I loved this feature because sometimes I come across another website I think would be great for the students to check out at another time. It was also very easy to share my search with my classroom. I just posted the link in our google classroom page and they had access whenever they wanted.

This assignment came at a perfect time because my 2nd graders just were assigned a research project on different animals. They were able to pick any animal and learn about it. I talked to them about how finding good information can be a struggle for them but I wanted them to try on their own. I gave them a list of great questions to get their minds thinking about what might be a good question or topic to research based on their animal .It's important to find good, reliable information on the web. I showed them the custom search I created and off they went! Now usually when doing research they ask me a million questions: Is this good? What does this say? Should I use this one? Because I could tailor the search to fit their needs, I didn't have any of those questions being thrown at me. They were able to research what they needed and read articles at their level. The only thing I didn't quite enjoy about creating a Custom Google Search is that I had to vet all the websites before adding them. I also needed  to make sure when a topic was searched enough resources came up that were what they were looking for and not just games (some of the sites have games with their information). It took a little bit of time to create but now I don't have to do it again! It's already there when I need to use it in my classroom. I will absolutely be using this Google Custom Search again when it comes time for my other students to complete research projects! The link is below if you want to check it out!

https://cse.google.com/cse?cx=006627231145852884557:5vgfcib2cw0