Week 3: Post # 1,2 & 3

What did you learn? What material was new to you? What were the three most important things you've learned in today's lesson/independent practice?

1. We learned about what R.E.A.L. was this week. R.E.A.L. stands for reading the URL, examine the content, ask about the author/owner, and look at the links. This helps us learn how to make a successful research on a subject. Reading the URL helps us make sure that the name of the URL is related to the subject we are researching. When you get into the website, you examine the content to make sure the website it legit. Ask about the author to learn background information about them, like if the person works for a company the information might be legit. Look at the links (forward and backward) to determine if the website has legit information.
2. We also learned about the algorithm as in the computer code. When you search for something in a search engine, the search engine will have spiders trace out into the Internet and find anything that relates to the keyword you typed in the search engine. The spiders look for the keyword in the URL, the title of the website, meta-tags, the links that go in and out of the page and it also searches for the websites that have the keyword appear the most in the website. Knowing this type of information helps up improve our searching and teaches us how the Internet looks things up for us.
3. We learned how to create a virtual index that will help us narrow down our research. We use site:command to search the website. You can also add a phrase by putting a plus sign (+) between the command and the phrase, then putting the phrase in quotations to narrow down your search results even more. This lesson would help make researching better and easier.