netTrekker Blog

What Are You Searching?

netTrekker d.i. just released the top searches this fall, sharing what our students are searching. Here’s a break down of the top 15 keyword searches:

1. Dogs
2. Games
3. Barack Obama
4. Animals
5. Halloween
6. Football
7. Civil War
8. Christopher Columbus
9. John McCain
10. Weather
11. Frogs
12. Plants
13. Native Americans
14. Cats
15. Cells

I’m curious though, why search for dogs in school? How are you using games in the classroom, and how is netTrekker d.i. helping you find games? Football – does it have an academic search purpose? (I actually had a complete unit for geography and math using hockey, so I’m not knocking sports in the classroom.  I just want to hear your responses on how football is used in the classroom.) Cats, those mysterious creatures, are also quite popular for keyword searches. Are they on the list for the same reason dogs are, or is there another reason cats appear on this list. 

Please share your comments below on how you or your students are using these key words in their studies.

By the way, there were over 1,087,610 unique search terms for the fall quarter. That’s a lot of key words!

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Tags: keyword, netTrekker d.i., search

5 Comments to What Are You Searching?

1. 

   This is really cool information to know, but dogs? and baffled as well.
John Lien on December 17th, 2008
2. 

   I know Joey searched dogs in January and February of last year, but that was because he was hoping to get a dog for his birthday. Especially a service dog. Then this summer he looked up information on cats since he had to rescue Sadie. Are there more kids looking for a pet? Maybe because President-elect Obama announced he was going to get his girls a dog, and maybe they were trying to decide which pet would be best so they could write letters of suggestions?
Danielle Abernethy on December 18th, 2008
3. 

   Dogs has been the #1 search term for sometime. Personally, I’d like to see Civil War be #1 but at least it is in the top 10.

   Jim
   Teaching the Civil War with Technology
Jim Beeghley on December 18th, 2008
4. 

   Hi,

   OK. Here’s my reason for using “dogs.” All kids like dogs. Even young kids can spell “dogs.” When I teach young students how to search our online catalog or netTrekker in our computer lab, I use easy-to-spell search terms so they can succesfully conduct an independent search. I can quickly determine if they are successful, because I know the results they should get. After dogs we move on to “cats!”
Paula on December 30th, 2008
5. 

   I find that in my district, teachers are very, how shall I say this nicely, “flexible” when assigning research projects. Especially at the lower grade levels a teacher will just let a student pick a topic and as long as they work through the research process and cover the standards,that is ok. Lots of kids choose things like dogs or cats in this situation.

   I have been working with teachers here in our system to do a better job of picking topics. I am encouraging them to use Net Trekker themselves BEFORE the students start and to build a list of topics from the resources found in Net Trekker–ESPECIALLY when they are doing biographical research. By doing some prework and using the “famous people” search feature they can be sure their students will find information and end up with a great product at the end. by saving searches, they can accomplish the same thing. Unfortunately, some of the educators I work with have one set of rules for researching with printed materials and another for online. Net Trekker is helping us overcome that and teach everyone that research is research and that their should be guidelines established.
Diane Barfield on January 7th, 2009

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