Search log for conspiracy theory assignment (English 7)

In English 7 the grading criteria says that students should be able to choose and use strategies to search for relevant information, structure it and assess the reliability of different sources.

In order to practice doing this, and enable the teacher to see your search strategy, you will be using search logs when searching for information about a chosen conspiracy theory.

In this film I explain to you how to use the search log, and also why it is important to learn and improve strategies for searching. Many times our strategies are old habits that we don't think about or think through. This is an opportunity to become aware of your search strategies and improve them.

I you prefer to read instructions about how to use the search log, here is a short summary of the film: 

The search log consists of 6 questions that you are supposed to answer for each search that you do. You copy the questions and paste them further down in your document, under headlines like "Search 1", "Search 2", etc.

The questions are found at the top of the search log that is available to you through google drive or google classroom. There you also find a search log example that I used while showing you the search log - use that example as a template of how you should use the search log.

It's important to use other search channels than just Google - on the school library website you find resources such as Britannica (an encyclopedia) and Ebsco (a database for articles from news papers, magazines and scientific journals). Learn more about these in the end of the film.


3 important things to remember:

The search log is also about improving your searches, for instance by using trampolines (= new search words that you find in the texts you find and read). By documenting and using trampolines, each search you make will be better than the one before - giving you more relevant and useful information, and also making you more knowledgable in your topic.

You will (or should) do more searches than you have use for. Since you should be critical towards your sources you should choose the best, most relevant and most reliable sources.

And finally - documenting your searching through this search log is going to take more time than what you may be used to. This is natural, since you are learning something new and are developing your search strategies. After a while of practice, searching with this kind of documentation will get easier and quicker - that is partly why we do this now, so that you will have practiced this kind of structured searching before going to university.