How-to Articles

• Goodbye Hotline

• Teaching Effective Search Strategies

• Information is Only a Text Message Away
   

Goodbye Hotline
By Sue Sledge

The former method for reporting network, repair and installations was to call X5078 and select the appropriate option.  So that we may provide faster and more accurate service to you, we have set up an email account ITRepair@amphi.com for you to report the above-referenced requests.  Please email complete information including your site, ASD#, type of computer, the serial number of the equipment,  location, and a description of the problem. The link is also listed on the technology department website.  Emergency calls may still be directed to Sue Sledge X5214.

Teaching Effective Search Strategies
By Peggy Steffens

Do you or your students simply go to Google and type in some words and get 200 million hits?  Do you want to learn to search more effectively without much effort?  Well, then the Illinois Math and Science Academy (IMSA) has the tool for you!   

• IMSA provides a search tool wizard that uses Google.  You or your students simply enter the words or phrase you want, the words you don’t want, acceptable domains (edu, gov, mil, etc.) or file types you are looking for (jpg, pdf, doc, ppt, etc.) and it creates the correct search engine string in the Google search engine.  You can view the tool at http://21cif.imsa.edu/tools/locate/.  Try a search topic and see what it looks like in the Google search instrument below.  For example, if your students were doing a search for information about what tigers eat.  They might enter the following:

• All of the words – tiger

• The exact phrase – eating habits

•  None of the words – Woods  (we don’t need to know the eating habits of Tiger Woods) 

The search tool would then put the following search string in Google tiger "eating habits" –woods.  This search results in 113,000 hits as opposed to the 208,000,000 had the student just typed tiger in Google.  Then, hopefully after reviewing the initial results, the students would see that diet is another good word to use to narrow the search and they would add that to their search string and the results would go down to 53,900.  We need to teach students the skills to be effective searchers and that once they get a set of results, they should use additional words or phrases to narrow down the search even more to get exactly what they are looking for and need.

In addition, if a teacher were starting a unit on bats and reading the book Stellaluna, he/she might want to see if there were any PowerPoint presentations on the web to use.  They would enter the following:

• At least one of the words - bats stellaluna

• Only the file extension - ppt

Information is Only a Text Message Away
By Debbie Anthony 

Attention all you non-stop adventurers!  Do you need info fast?  It’s at your fingertips if you have a cell phone with text messaging capability.

In the body of the email, request your information along with the city or zip code.  A typical message could look like:

·       seafood San Francisco
·       museums Paris
·       musicals New York City

My request to Yahoo for “PF Changs Tucson” returned 3 text messages.  All gave the restaurant’s name, phone #, address, location and URL.  The first one listed information for PF Changs.  The second one provided information for Pei Wei Asian Diner and the third gave me information for Wildflower Restaurant.  The same request to 4INFO returned 1 text message with the information for PF Changs.  4INFO took longer to reply.

So many possibilities!  Here are some examples: