Post 26: WW1 and Key Words

I have talked before about activities to assist students in learning how to generate search terms. Today I had two classes in to start their research on the theatres of war in World War One and this is what we did.

1. I started by asking them what they used when on a search engine or in a databases to find information on a particular subject.  Surprisingly it took a moment to come up with with the term, key words.

2. Then I asked them to take 30 seconds to write a few key words which would generate results on WW1 as a broad topic.

3. They already had World War 1 (one) and after a whole class discussion, we came up with:

World War 1
First World War
The Great War
Then we added 1914-18 as a modifier to the first two, after discovering that sometimes you also       got results on World War 2 (the Second World War) and by adding the dates, that probably wouldn't happen.

I also explained that The Great War would probably be sufficient since no other war was known         as that.  We looked at the results for The Great War and discovered that some of the results were the same as they got when using the other two terms.  However, there were also results that hadn't shown up with the other terms.

4.  Students were asked next to come up with more keywords, this time based on what they already knew about about the theatre of war they were going to research.  This netted some more search terms, which they shared with the class.

5. The next step was to take the assignment sheet and look at the topics suggested in each theatre of war.  Students were able to add more key words from there.

6. Finally, I had placed a selection of books on each of the 4 tables relating to the theatres of war.  Students were asked to go through the index or tables of contents to compile more key words.

7. At the end of the session, students had a list of key words to start their research.  I have encouraged them to continue to refine their lists by adding new words and eliminating words which give them no real results.

It will be interesting to see if their research results are better than they have been in the past.

Tomorrow both classes are back to work on a topic in science and I am hoping that they can go through the same process we did today but by themselves.  We shall see!