netTrekker Blog

Research Review

We’ve been noticing great postings out there about netTrekker d.i. on various blogs. I’ve done a little digging on some recent postings and it looks like the blogs are coming from students at La Conner School District in Washington State. I have yet located the teacher’s blog with the assignment, but the students have done a fantastic job of detailing their research results and strategies.

Here are a few of the links for you to check out:
• http://fohnjared.blogspot.com/
• http://zoriak.blogspot.com/
• http://classworklc.blogspot.com/
• http://guitarhero2012.blogspot.com/

I love how these students took to the time to compare and contrast the features of netTrekker d.i. and Google. We know Google is a great search engine, but when you’re working in a school setting, time is of the essence, and you need to reach students with different needs. netTrekker d.i. clearly triumphs according to these students! They mention the readability, the dictionary hot key, and the website ratings. Here’s a quote from the first blog:

“I think that Nettrekker is the better search engine over Google. Google might come up with more results but Nettrekker is better because it helps you narrow your results and it gives you ratings which help you to find better sites faster. Nettrekker was the site that returned more relevant information to me than Google did. Nettrekker is way easier to use because you are in a more refined site and you aren’t out on the World Wide Web. I tried all the things suggested like the dictionary and the subject headings and they prove that Nettrekker is better than Google because it helps you to refine your research and find more relevant information.”

What a great quote, especially from a student!

My Portfolio within netTrekker d.i. provides a great way to record your  research information. Remember those index cards that we all used for each resource with the details from each periodical, including notes to use in our paper? I always lost mine. With netTrekker d.i., if you find a website that you want to use as a resource, you can save it to My Portfolio. The default setting includes the date you saved the search. You’ll now have this information for your bibliography. Then once in the My Portfolio area, you can edit each website and change the description with your notes. (This description will only be seen by you.) You can also add a template and add all sorts of information there, including a note to yourself of what type of information you are still looking for, printed resource information you are using such as a journal or periodical, or even a rough draft of your paper.

Look for our upcoming series, 5 Days of My Portfolio in January. This blog collection will definitely be of use to the teachers creating project based learning units and to students conducting research.

And to the teacher of these fine students, thank you! Keep up the great work. If you don’t mind, I’d love to interview you for a future blog on how you are using netTrekker d.i. Please e-mail me your contact information.

If you are using netTrekker d.i. with your students, leave a comment below telling us how.

Tags: My Portfolio, netTrekker d.i., research