Learning Digitally

Question: How do you find what your looking for when searching on the Internet? Answer: Keywords, Keywords, Keywords.

It wasn’t too many years ago that teaching how to build an Internet search criteria meant explaining Boolean operators, either as words or symbols. I remember having the poster “My plump starfish quickly lowered Lincoln’s tie” to help students remember minus, plus, star (wildcard), quotes, lower case, link, and title. The acronym was an effective memory tool for the terms, but I’m not sure it was effective in showing how   combination of terms work to focus in on the sites containing the information on the student’s topic. Boolify works as both a search engine and a visual learning tool to demonstrate how Boolean operators work together.

Boolify uses the familiar mental model of building a puzzle to help students construct and organize their search criteria. Starting with a green puzzle piece a the student begins building their search with a keyword or phrase with the results appearing below with the total number of sites shown.

Now Boolify becomes a powerful tool to demonstrate how to combine Boolean operators “and,” “not,” and “or’ to focus your search results.

Yellow puzzle piece representing the Boolean operator “or” placed after the green puzzle piece expands the search to locate sites with information on keyword 1 or keyword 2. Placing a blue piece, the Boolean operator “and”, focuses the search results to only those sites that have information on keyword 1 and keyword 2. If the topic is broad a red puzzle piece, the Boolean operator “not”, could be use to narrow search results by only finding sites that do not contain specific words or phrases.

Using Boolify as a whole class activity can be a very engaging way to have students work together to come up with effective search strategies. Teachers who have access to a interactive white board can engage the  entire class in brainstorming, having the students come up with suggestions on how to expand or narrow a topic. From the brainstorming activity students could then go to the board to piece together their search criteria, recording how the number of sites returned changes with each new piece added to the search query. Using Boolify in pairs or teams, students could sharpen their skills by searching for answers to trivia questions with the winning team the one who answers the question with the fewest number of sites returned.