An Educator's Search Technique's

Marsha Ratzel shares the following techniques with Teacher Magazine readers:

I have learned from my school library media specialists always to use the advanced search. I dutifully type the keywords “student engagement” in one box and "2010" in the "Publication Date" box. I also take a moment to check the box that reads "only" under "Full Text Articles." That way I don’t waste my time chasing an article that I can’t access because the library hasn't subscribed to it. I've also learned that if you hover the mouse over the magnifying glass in the list of articles, you can read the article's abstract without opening the whole thing. This makes it super time efficient and I can easily determine which articles I want to read all the way through. So out of the possible 6,000,000 articles in the database, as in this case, I found seven worth scanning.

-D.D.