Internet Communication

We have been investigating how to refine our internet searches, including being purposeful in the search engine of our choice. Year Six would like to share our key findings from the first part of this learning:

In a browser, you can use a search engine. You can search from the search bar or from the address bar.  (James and Molly2)

When you search in the address bar, you may be searching using a different search engine to the one seen on the screen. (Bertie)

Click on the three dots and then 'settings'; then choose the browser that you would like to use in future. This will be your search bar browser. (Reece)

When you use "  ", it searches for every word in the inverted commas and doesn't leave a single word out. (Ava)

Careful to ask the exact question you need. Is your search going to find your intended answer. For example, if you want to know if every country uses Whatsapp, then you may need to search for countries that do not use it. That makes a difference! (Josh)

Web Crawlers

We examined how web crawlers search the internet to create indexes to make search engines quicker. We even had a go at carrying out our own indexing of common objects in the classroom! It was amazing to think how many website contain the same words to be indexed and just how many indexed words there may be, considering the massive increase of websites now.

Trying to be number one!

Next, we examined how search engines rank websites. Although not all of the criteria are shared by the search engines, we do know some of them. In groups, we tried to draft out a website that would be ranked higher than that of our friends.

Adding titles with the search term and links to popular sites helped to raise our ranking; however, adding our search term again and again did not help. Search engine algorithms would identify this and ignore repetitions of search terms like, 'Berkswich CE Primary'.

The photo above shows how the sites that were created by each group were ranked. Although we knew how we were ranking the sites, it is interesting to learn that search engines do not make all of their ranking criteria known to the public.

We learnt more about what influences search results and the order that they appear on the screen. Layla and Nancy shared their findings and some from the other teams...

We discussed many ways in which we communicate, including symbols and gestures, like nodding. It was much harder to communicate the definition of communicate than we thought!

Thinking about how we communicate online, we discussed a number of scenarios and the app, platform or device we would use for each one. This was a useful way in which to think about how we take care with the messages that we send. Great team-work, Izzy, Isla and Molly!