Last week I made the use case for Google Scholar. It’s one of many valuable search tools that students often overlook.
Of course, you can’t really say students are overlooking those tools if no one shows them. So this week I have some search tools and resources that are often overlooked by teachers and students.
Your school library!
Your school library or local public library will most likely pay for a subscription to a database of scholarly articles. Some examples of them include JSTOR, Academic Search Premier, and ScienceDirect. Librarians at your school and at public libraries will be happy, perhaps delighted that you have asked, to show your students how to access those databases through a library login.
In addition to the aforementioned subscription databases, there are free databases that your students can use in their research processes. Some popular options include eric and semantic scholar.
Wolfram Alpha
Wolfram Alpha bills itself as a computational search engine. He’s probably best known for helping students solve math problems, since they can enter a problem and see the steps to solve it. An often overlooked aspect of Wolfram Alpha is the ability to enter a query and view a fact sheet on the subject of the query. For example, entering “Martin Luther King” into Wolfram Alpha will result in viewing a fact sheet containing a list of key biographical facts about King’s life. Enter “Martin Luther King” and “John F. Kennedy” as part of the same query into Wolfram Alpha and you’ll see a side-by-side display of fact sheets on each man and see a timeline of where their lives overlap. For students who need to quickly find just the basic facts about a topic, a query in Wolfram Alpha often gets them to the information they need faster than entering the same query on Google.com.
get the research
get the research is a fairly small search engine that focuses on helping people find scholarly articles. A search on Get The Research will return a short summary of the searched topic and a list of published scholarly articles. The articles in the search results will be a mix of open access articles and paid articles. You can filter the results to show only open access articles.
duck duck to win
duck duck to win is increasing in popularity due to its claim to offer private searches without tracking. While Google and Bing will track your search history (through users’ Google or Microsoft accounts and/or through browser settings), DuckDuckGo does not track search history. There is a potential benefit to students using DuckDuckGo in addition to the privacy aspect. By not tracking search habits, DuckDuckGo’s search results are not influenced by a user’s previous search and click histories. This has the potential to pull students out of a bubble of results that are influenced by their past actions.
Self-paced courses you can start today
I have three self-paced courses that you can start today and finish at your own pace.
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