Helping Children Find What They Need on the Internet

Thanks to Lesley Thomson and Jenny Foreman (Scottish Government) for highlighting the following article in the Information Literacy Community of Practice

Article from the New York Times reporting on research sponsored by Google and developed by the University of Maryland and the Joan Ganz Cooney Center, "aimed at discerning the differences between how children and adults search and identify the barriers children face when trying to retrieve information." Lesley Thomson

A very interesting article and not just relevant to understanding how children search. In our experience re: training in the Scottish Government, sometimes adults don't always understand the 'multi step question' as described in the article.

As for the 'Wonder Wheel' (see below) also mentioned, we have recently requested that our IT services enable this feature to be available in our training rooms so that we can demonstrate it. At present we are unable to view the 'Wonder Wheel' from our desktops because Active X isn't facilitated. Fingers crossed we'll be able to use it at least in the training rooms in the near future.

"In May, Google introduced Wonder Wheel, a graphical search tool aimed at making browsing easier. (To find it, click on “show options” on a page of search results; it appears halfway down the left column.) For a search on “apple,” the wheel shows prongs pointing to “apple fruit” or “apple store locator” in the left panel." Jenny Foreman

As they say it is an interesting article and there comments in relation to their experience of adults within the Scottish Government are interesting and useful. I did a search on Google for information literacy and had a look at Google's Wonder Wheel (see link below) which was great it's like a mind map of results. I also liked the options available for viewing your results:

• All results: Images; Videos; News; Blogs; Updates; Books; Forums 


• Any time: Latest; Past 24 hours; Past week; Past year; Specific date range


• Standard view: Related searches; Wonder wheel; Timeline


• Standard results: Images from the page; Fewer shopping sites; More shopping sites; Page previews; Translated search