E-learning Advent Calendar
I’ve been writing less in the blog at the moment – lots of effort is going into the ELKS “Advent of Technology” Calendar, full of people’s favourite tools for teaching and learning with technologies.
You don’t even have to be a member to see the calendar :)
Today’s entry (December 11th): Google and Google Scholar
A good search engine has to be among the “best tools”. And can I be controversial and recommend Google Scholar too? Although it’s nothing like as good as the databases and services your institutional library undoubtedly offers, I find it’s a great place to start my literature search to get a bit of a feel for the subject and its primary exponents.
It’s surprising how many students don’t know how to use a search engine properly, or how to evaluate the results when they get them. It’s something that a group of us at ELKS have started creating guidelines for. Hopefully the guidelines can be used by any tutor for any class where students need to search the web (there’ll be a section on Wikipedia as well… but that’s a ‘whole other story’ !).