Besides being a staff writer here at WorldStart, I also work part time as an academic coach at my university. One thing I’m commonly running into with the students I’m helping in the Academic Support Center is that they don’t know how to do the right kind of search to find information that will help them the right information.
Google wants to change that by offering educators free lesson plans for educators to instruct students on how to search more efficiently, think of the right search terms, (and perhaps most importantly) how to evaluate a resource for credibility. To view these lesson plans, click Lesson Plans and Activities. The lesson plans are divided up by topic and within the topic by difficulty (beginner, intermediate, and advanced). You can also check out more information on how to use these lesson plans by clicking Lesson Overview. From there, you can check out the Lesson Plan Map for how best to implement the information by checking out the skills and other essentials that students will need before hand and develop through the lessons.
Once you’ve used the lesson plan to teach the students the skills they need, you can switch over to making them practice their new skills with the Google a Day Challenge. You can watch this video  to see how the Google a Day challenges work. They provide a question and then the student use their research skills to find the correct answer. This encourages critical thinking and develops their web research skills. They offer challenges on Culture, Geography, History, and Science. I can easily see this adapting for other branches of learning as well.
Live Training is a webinar series that helps you improve your own search skills, as well as how you can improve search literacy at your school. It will teach the basics of how Google works, the way you can apply filters to your searches to quickly find the information you need, using Google Map and Google Scholar to get the best results, and so much more. Each topic listed on the page is a video, and if you click you will be able to watch that webinar topic.
What I really love about this is you don’t have to be an educator to use this information. People all over the world use Google Search everyday. It has the potential to help everyone who uses the internet search more efficiently. I particularly love the example that starts the first webinar, Even Better Search where the presenter walks you through how to find a book that you read, but can’t remember the title of using Google Image Search.
Check it out here!