The internet is the quickest and easiest way to get information. For assignments, activities, craft ideas, researching or developing your own ideas for the classroom or for your own benefits. The internet has a vast array of sources to gain information on.
How to Google
There is so much information available on Google sometimes it’s hard to find exactly what you’re looking for. With hundreds of websites available, searching for specific information can take hours instead of taking a couple of minutes.
When searching for information on a search engine such as “Google” try and be specific. Use simple keywords with descriptive words if necessary. For example “fine motor skill development in toddlers” will be a better search than “fine motor development”. This will probably give you too many results not relevant to what you are looking for if you are being too general with the keywords you search.
At times the keywords you type may not find the information you acquire. If this is the case, change up the key words to something different still related to your search. For example you can change “fine motor skill development in toddlers” to “small muscle development toddlers”. This is exactly as fine motor development however you are just changing the key words.
Don’t worry too much about spelling, punctuation and capital letters. Google has spell checker which will automatically uses the most common spelling of the word you are searching, capital letters doesn’t make a different and most punctuation is ignored during the search.
So in short, be specific in your search and search on credible sites.
Researching For Assignments
For researching assignments and assessments, the best place to look is in journal articles, which can be done on Google Scholar. If you are not use to reading or looking for information in journal articles this may be too much for you, however at University level this is what you will have to do. Most University libraries will have a vast database for you to search through.
When choosing a website to gather information from, usually it is best to use a site that is more factual and credible. Blogs and non-reputed websites written by individuals usually are not a good place to get information, because it could be their opinion they are writing about rather than actual facts based off studies.
Google Scholar provides a simple way to broadly search across many sources: articles, theses, books, academic publishers, universities and others. It helps you to find relevant work across of scholarly research.
Choosing A Website For Information
Once you have completed your search in “Google” you will be presented with a pages of websites which has the keywords highlighted which you typed into the search field.
On the page that Google suggests you may not find the information you want however it doesn’t mean you should disregard the entire site. Go through the website and you may find what you are looking for somewhere on the site itself. Usually website will have a “search bar”, usually at the top of the page. Like you did with Google search, type in what you are after on that specific site and it will display all the information on the site based on the keywords you used.
Wikipedia has a lot of useful information which can be used (although it should not be used as a source of information on assignments). You may notice when reading through the information on Wikipedia there are a lot of citations. When you scroll to the bottom of the page it lists all the sources. You can access most of these sources’ by clicking on them. These are very valuable (articles, government sites, statistics, journals, newspapers, etc) as it will provide you with further information on what you are reading on the Wikipedia site itself and they are credible. Don’t just stop at one source of information; keep looking until you find exactly what you need.
Referencing From A Website
Whether you are gathering information from a website for assignments, for ideas or for researching purposes it’s important to have a reference. A reference basically tells you and others where you found the information from. If you are using any information that isn’t your own on assignments it is important that you include references to where you gathered the information from. When referencing a website you must include the following:
- author (month & year of publication)
- title of article OR title of website
- retrieved from (copy and paste url here)
Always reference anything you use that is not your own work / words.
Although the internet is full of information, sometimes you still may not find what you’re after. Even though there seems like everything is available at some stage you may not find what you’re looking for. In this case, get down to your local library and find the information you need from there. A Library is still the most valuable source of information, so use it when necessary.