Simple online search does not bring effective results. To find out useful information for educational stuff we need to learn 'how search engines work?', How to use appropriate keywords to find out specific information? and some basic knowledge of getting most from internet to create work sheets or resources for classrooms use.

1. USING SEARCH ENGINES TO
PREPARE RESOURCES AND
WORKSHEETS

2. WE ARE LEARNING ABOUT:
 Search Engines and how they work?
 Which Search Engines are best for educational search?
 Use specific keyword to find relevant information.
 How to recognize a link?
 Select and save relevant information
 Creating work sheet and inserting clip art
 Types of files such as Word, Power Point slide, PDF,
Video, Flash, Winzip, Winrar.
 Software's you need to keep!

3. FINDING INFORMATION VIA SEARCH ENGINES
 Search engines are software programs, not rational
human beings, they work according to rules
established by their creators for what words are
usually important in a broad range of documents.
 With billions of pages, you could spend a lifetime
hunting for specific information.
 Many Web sites are intended to sell, advertise, or
promote products or services
 Popular search engines let you define search
criteria in very specific ways, but not all function
identically.

4. WHERE SHOULD WE START?
 Searching the Web requires part skill, part luck and a
little bit of art.
 To enter the world wide web you need to open a page
first and enter the text or keyword to search for the
stuff.
 Understanding how to perform sophisticated searches of
online information will greatly increase your chances of
finding what you want.
 Although search engines like Bing, Google and Yahoo!
index billions of web pages and other electronic
documents, this represents only a tiny part of the total
information available on the World Wide Web.
 We need to start searching from specific search
engines.

5. SPECIFIC SEARCH ENGINES
 Search engines such as Google and Yahoo! search
the internet for keywords or phrases, and then
show you the results.
 These results are not mediated by the search
engines, and therefore you need to use your own
judgment on the reliability of the results. You may,
for example, find websites written by experts,
usually edu. Or gov. sites for useful and reliable
information.

6. WHAT ARE LINKS?
 On most web pages--you will see words that are in
color, usually blue, and often underlined. By clicking
these words, known as hypertext, you jump to other
places on the page, to other pages on the site, or to
other resources on the Internet.
 You can also click certain graphics, called
hyperlinks, to access other resources.

7. HOW TO RECOGNIZE A LINK?

8. USE SPECIFIC KEYWORD TO FIND RELEVANT
INFORMATION
 Effective searching helps connect you with the right
info.
Keywords suggestions for Educational
information:
 Keywords are significant words which define the
subject you are looking for.
 To find information on a particular topic, start with the
main word or words that describe the topic.

9. USE SPECIFIC KEYWORD TO FIND
RELEVANT INFORMATION
 You many use keywords such as:
 Early years
 Foundation stage
 Kindergarten
 EYFS (Early years foundation stage)
 Subject related to search such as ‘literacy’, ‘Numeracy’,
‘Religion’ etc

10. WHICH SEARCH ENGINES ARE BEST FOR EDUCATIONAL
RESOURCES
You may use specific search engine
such as:
 http://www.searchedu.com/
 'shambles.net‘
 EduHound.com
 http://www.virtuallrc.com/(Virtual
Learning resource Center)

11. USEFUL WEBSITES TO DOWNLOAD
EDUCATIONAL STUFF
 http://www.tes.co.uk/teaching-resource/
 http://www.bromleycma.org.uk/eyfs
 http://www.beam.co.uk/
 http://eduscapes.com/tap/index.htm

12. DOWNLOADING FILES FROM THE INTERNET
 When you download a file, you transfer it from the
Internet to your computer.
 When you download files, Windows usually saves
them in the Downloads folder which is located
under your user name in the users folder on the
drive where Windows is installed (for example
C:usersyour namedownloads).
 When you are saving the file, you can choose to
save it to a different folder.

13. TYPES OF FILES: SUCH AS WORD, POWER POINT SLIDE, PDF,
VIDEO, FLASH ETC
 Use specific programs to open your saved files
such as:
 Word files: Microsoft Word
 Power Point Slides: Microsoft Power Point
 PDF: Adobe Acrobat Reader
 Flash: Flash player
 Videos: Windows Media Player
 YouTube videos: To open these videos you need to
install ‘Vlc player’

14. IMAGE SEARCH ENGINES
 You may use Google: Basic Image Search for your
image search.
 From the left drop down menu, select ‘Line
Drawing’, ‘Clip art’ or ‘Black and white’ image to
use for your worksheet.
 Image search sites:
 http://images.google.com/
 http://www.picsearch.com/
 Clip art Search sites:
 Google Image Search for 'clipart'
 http://www.artclips.com/
 http://classroomclipart.com/ is a source for free clip
art pictures and illustrations.

15. SOFTWARE'S YOU NEED TO KEEP!
 Softwares are computer programs which help you
to open or access certain files.
 You may download or get a ‘software’ dvd to install
these softwares at your desktop or notebook:
 Microsoft Word
 Adobe acrobat reader
 Winzip
 Flash player
 Youtube downloader, VLC player

16. INSERTING IMAGE OR CLIP ART INTO WORD
DOCUMENT
 Creating work sheets with Microsoft Word is easy
 There are several ways to insert a picture into your Word
document. The easiest way is to drag and drop the photo
from Windows Explorer into your document.
But the traditional way to insert a picture is to use
the Insert menu:
1. Click Insert
2. Select Picture
3. On the Submenu, select From file
 Insert clip art into a Word document
 Place the insertion point in your document where you want
to insert clip art, and then click the clip you want.

17. CREATE A DOCUMENT WITH MICROSOFT
WORD
 Open a new document
 Write the topic such as ‘Lesson plan for Play Group’
 If you want to insert a table, decide how many rows
and columns you need!
 Click ‘Insert’, then ‘table’ and select the rows and
tables and start writing your lesson plan
 For notices, keep a logo of your school at your hard
disk.
 If needed you may first add it to the head of the
document (called header)

18. WORKING WITH MICROSOFT WORD
 You can easily draw a table to distribute your piece
of text into two, four, eight or more parts to make it
handy and ready for printing.
 Click at ‘print preview’ menus to check ‘how your
document will look like when it is printed?’
 Click ‘Print’ only once to get your ‘print out’
 We can save paper and printing cost by distributing
our document into two, four or eight parts. It is
suggested to use this method for regular notices.

19. SELECTING FONTS FOR YOUR DOCUMENT
 We commonly use Arial, Times News Roman,
Courier, Helvetica, etc.
 You can change font, font size, font style at your
Word document
 You can reduce printing costs of documents if you
can figure out ways that will decrease the
consumption of ink while printing.
 According to a study: Garamond* followed by
Courier turned out to be the most economic fonts of
them all while Impact and Comic Sans consumed
the maximum ink.

20. CHECK MY BLOG FOR CONTINUED ARTICLES ABOUT
THIS COMPUTER TRAINING
You can find these two relevant tutorials at my blog
for further learning:
 Tutorial for teachers- Using image search engines
and sites to find images and clip art
 Tutorial for teachers - How to select keywords to
get the best search results?
http://alearnersdiary.blogspot.com/
 Another post:
http://alearnersdiary.blogspot.com/2008/09/where-to-search-
for-educational-stuff.html