Appendix I: How to Search the Internet for EE Information How to use the Internet • A Web-based tutorial- If you are just beginning to learn to use the Internet, an excellent tutorial on the basics is offered by the PDE at L2L.org/usetech.html, click on “Link to Learn
Professional Development.”Once there, under the “Learn” category, click on “Technology
Tutorials/Internet Help/Beginners Guide to the Internet for Educators.” • A Reference Book- Another resource for getting started is the book The Whole Internet The Next Generation, by Conner-Sax, K. & Krol, E., (1999), published by O’Reilly & Associates, Inc., Sebastopol, CA. • Webopedia- This is a Web-based online dictionary and search engine for complete Internet technology. Go to www.webopedia.com/. Search engines A search engine is a tool that will search for Internet sites containing the words that you designate as keywords.
It provides results back to you in the form of links to those sites. There are different types of search engines. • Subject Directoriesorganize Internet sites by subject, allowing users to choose a subject of interest and then browse the list of resources in that category. • Keyword searches use the keywords designated by the client to search the Internet for links. • Advanced searches use operators (and, or, not, near) and expression syntax--quotes and parentheses to construct queries. • Metasearch engines let you submit a query to several search engines at the same time. They can be very helpful if you don’t expect to get a lot of results. Examples of these types of search engines can be found at the following Web sites: www.yahoo.com, www.excite.com, altavista.com, and metacrawler.com Appendix III lists EE terms that may be useful in your search. Tips for productive searching Once you complete a basic keyword search, you may decide that your search is either too broad or too narrow.
There are a number of strategies for refining your search. • Quotation Marks If you enclose keywords in quotation marks, you are searching for those exact words in that
exact order. For example, acid rain returns results with pages that contain the words acid or rainat any location on the page, whereas, “                                                                                                      acid rain” returns results with pages that have the
exact phrase acid rain somewhere on the page. • Boolean Operators
You can use the words and or not to narrow a search. A plus sign (+) is equivalent to the word and, a minus sign (-) is equivalent to the word not. For example, “education” and “ lesson plan” or alternately: “ education” + “ lesson plan” returns with both educationand lesson planpresent on the page. You can use the word or to broaden a search. For example, “education” or “                                                                                                                                                                                    lesson plan”
returns results with a list of links to sites containing either the word educationor the phrase lesson planor both. education lesson plan 30 Next Page Module II Home