Research Resources via Virginia Tech and Google

Spring semester often means the start of research paper season around here. If you're looking for a new approach, here are three resources you might want to peruse.

Virginia Tech Library's "How Do I..." Research Resources

Virginia Tech's library website has a "How Do I..." page that offers a variety of research tools and resources regarding topics such as "Conduct Research" and "Find and Use Articles." Some tools are geared specifically for their library, but a number of them can be tweaked to assist our students.

Using "A Google A Day" to Build Research Skills

Google has started offering daily mini-research challenges. Each day, Google posts a research topic through their "A Google A Day" for students to practice their researching skills. Google's challenge topics fall into four categories: culture, geography, history, and science. Each challenge question comes with a few Google slides for the teacher. The slides include the challenge question, hints to get started, the challenge answer, at least one explanation of how to research the answer, and other pages like background information and/or further discussion/follow-up questions.

Google Lesson Plans
Google has also published a few lesson plans for research: 

*Picking the right search term
*Understanding research results
*Narrowing a search to get the best results
*Searching for evidence for research tasks
*Evaluating credibility of sources

Each lesson comes in three levels (beginner, intermediate, and advanced) so that you can select what best fits your students' knowledge level.

Happy researching!