Basic Google search

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One great thing I found was this posters for Teacher Librarians and Educators to use which I sourced from the blog by Google called the librarian central http://librariancentral.blogspot.com/


They also had this great poster which shows really clearly basic Boolean search techniques.


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See below for some of the searches that I did and the success that I had ( or didn't as the case may be)

Inquiry based learning- 6,730000 results in 0.07 seconds

“inquiry based learning” “medieval Europe” 439 results 0.15 seconds - there were no age appropriate resources

“inquiry based learning” Medieval Europe” “Middle School” 126 results in 0.11 seconds – this got no good results, it was all documents about curriculum planning for American schools.

“inquiry based learning” history “middle school” 27,100 results in 0.17 seconds- although there were a lot of hits I finally found something that looked good. There was one useful website that had good links to further reading on other websites and articles. http://www.thirteen.org/edonline/concept2class/inquiry/index.html Thirteen Ed online. It had resources on planning inquiry units of work as well as some clear definitions. The rest of the sites however seemed to be more focused on Science units of work. I will try and put in the American subject term for history which is social science and see if I come up with more hits.

“Inquiry based learning” “social science” “middle school” came up with 3,440 results in 0.38 seconds- there wasn’t anything of interest  here, it just came up with a whole bunch of lessons plans that didn’t suit what I was searching for. There were however a range of academic papers that appeared through this search that looked like they could be interesting but could not access the full text version, I will use the libraries journal database subsctiptions for this.

“inquiry based learning” “social science” – 8,810 in 0.32 seconds -found the questioning tool kit http://www.fromnowon.org/nov97/toolkit.html which was useful even though it was aimed at a tertiary level not middle school.

“guided inquiry” this search found 45,400 results in 0.13 seconds. The hits were a lot more applicable to sorts of resources I was looking for. Perhaps because guided inquiry is a more structured model of inquiry based learning it is a lot easier to find information relevant to my needs.

Information search models 88,500,000 in 0.31 seconds

“information search models” 6,710 in .38 seconds

“information literacy model” 44,200 – There were some great hits in this search.

http://www.shambles.net/pages/learning/infolit/infolitmod/ has a really good overview of HEAPS of different models.

The rest of the sources are a confused bunch. There seems to be a lot of competing information about what information literacy, critical literacy and inquiry learning are. The terms seem to get interchanged when it’s not really appropriate.