Searching the Web

When I was set with the task of researching assistive technology I first started with a Google search because I am most familiar with this process. For all my searches I put the words in quotes. The Google search had plenty of options from sites where I could purchase assistive equipment, blogs, government sites and articles on the topic. I feel I found what I would need to get started learning about this topic yet.

I then searched using Delicious and had a list of all new sources. The fact that these are sites that other people have used led me to link and look around. I found one person whose bookmark was a list of links with a one line detail describing the link. This would be very helpful since it is so specific to the sub topics of assistive technology.

Diigo was my next try. I liked the aspect on this search site that showed me who had used this site before and then offered their tags that then took me to even more links. There was a list of blog sites on the left hand side of the Diigo site that then gave me access to personal and professional blogs.

The Bing and the Yahoo sites seemed very similar to the Google search, nothing too different from what I had already seen and many links took me to sites selling things.

Utube was next and spent some time watching videos. I can relate to my students when they tell me they would rather watch something versus read something. Video and audio combined has such a big impact in terms of learning and even memory for me. My memory of the videos compared to what I read about assistive technology is more vivid.

The last place I looked for information on assistive technology was the UAA Consortium Library. Recently I went with one of my classes to the library and Judy Green, the Education Libraria, gave us a tour of the library and taught us how to search for information within their system. I found this very helpful and it has given me yet another way to find information. I recommend checking out the site, find the Educational Resource Information Center, ERIC data base and then the Teacher Reference Center data base that are both on the Education page in the library system.

When doing future research I would likely use a combination of search engines starting with Google, Delicious and Utube for general information. If I needed to do a research paper then I would likely use the library search engines for articles and books related to my topic.