Evaluating websites exercise

I just gave my "Clean Off Your Google Goggles" Workshop for the 3rd time. This time was very successful. I presented the workshop, and then I had the students complete the exercise that is shown above. I think it really helped the students have an understanding of the quality of resources they will receive with using different search engines.

In this workshop, I also introduced how to search for only government websites in Google. This feature is at www.google.com/unclesam. This website will definitely be useful to our Criminal Justice students.


A Search for the "death penalty" is shown below. The students were able to see the quality of results were better than searching for the death penalty under the normal google.com platform.

** Sorry for cross posting. I also put this blog post on my personal/professional blog.

Clean Off your Google Goggles

I created a new workshop this past quarter called Clean off your Google Goggles.

I thought I'd share some of the concepts and a few of the slides.


I had the students help me make a list of what constitutes a quality website and a poor quality website. The students actually put together a nice list, and it was a great, interactive way to start the workshop.



Next, I showed the students some examples of bad websites and good websites. It's easy to find links for these sites b/c of lists like this provided on the web.



Then, I explained all the other fixings that Google has to offer like Google Scholar, Images, News, Maps, Alerts, etc. The students didn't seem aware of anything beyond the usual, basic google.com search. I think they were pretty intrigued by setting up an Alert to track websites and articles throughout the few weeks that they'd be doing research each quarter.

Also, I think they liked being able to search solely for newspaper articles similar to searching for newspaper articles in the databases.









Next, we went through the alternatives to Google. I took them through google search in each of the different jazzy google options like Scholar, etc, and then I used the same keywords that we selected in the Ebsco databases. Then, I took them to Encyclopedia Britannica.