This article from School Library Journal describes a presentation from Debbie Abilock, co-owner of Noodletools, the premier citation site available as far as I'm concerned. Not only does Debbie help students understand the basics behind citations instead of focusing on the trivial details like punctuation, the site also offers search tips and lesson ideas for teachers who teach research lessons.
This particular presentation talked about using specific search engines to find answers to specific questions rather than just relying on Google for everything. Teaching kids to think about their research before they start searching is another tip. This is probably the hardest part of a research lesson. The computer is like a siren calling to students to jump on and find the answer--when sometimes they don't even know what the question is!
The presentation gave some specific helpful hints even for a search engine like Google. For example I didn't know this--When searching for information between a number range, use two dots between the years or numbers rather than a hypen. So for example, if you want to find out the number of major hurricanes that took place in Florida, type in "major hurricanes Florida 1996..2010" into your search."
All in all sounds like an excellent presentation and I'm sorry I missed it! Thanks to SLJ for the write up.
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