Digital Lunch: Using Google Search Operators to Research How to End Hunger (#TeachSDGs)
What does the word “ hunger” even mean? Many of our students, particularly in our international schools, have very little experience with this concept. They may say that they are “starving” when they are 10 minutes late to lunch, but have no authentic connection to this idea of “Zero Hunger”, which is the subject of the second Sustainable Development Goal put forth by the United Nations. 
Also, they fail to appreciate the components that all have to work together to ensure that their lunch even makes it to the cafeteria. You can understand why one of the first of UNESCO‘s “key competencies” is to develop an understanding of the processes and mechanisms that create or diminish hunger using a systems thinking approach.
Systems thinking, in a nutshell, can be described as a way of thinking about, and a language for describing and understanding, the forces and interrelationships that shape the behavior of systems. This discipline helps us to see how to change systems more effectively, and to act more in tune with the natural processes of the natural and economic world.
Peter Senge , quoted originally from The Fifth Discipline: The Art & Practice of The Learning Organization
You can see why UNESCO (The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization) believes that it is critical to use this approach in order to advance sustainable development goals. When connecting the dots, students need to research the underpinnings of the problem in order to introduce new tools and methods that could develop more sustainable pathways for those people and communities that are facing an experience of true hunger.
Thus it seems vital that, as we explore Google Apps for Education, we explore the importance of Google search operators that eliminate frivolous information and refine research efforts so that students can cut through the nonsense and find relevant and helpful information as it relates to this SDG.
However, perhaps before launching into a tirade of internet research, you can share an inspiring story of a person or organization that is attempting to do their part to tackle Zero Hunger. There is a great story about the former President of Trader’s Joe Grocery chain, Doug Rauch, who went into retirement but then traded in his golf clubs because he wanted to address the hunger-related problem called “food deserts” by creating a food market; the Daily Table helps those impoverished community members in the Boston area. He is a great example of someone who examined the systems around food deserts when developing this grocery store, and his story can provide a lot of “food for thought” (sorry I couldn’t resist the pun) as a provocation.
Now going back to Google Search……
Rember that in a typical Google Search, there are thousands if not millions of results of sites that are indexed for the content you could be looking for. It’s overwhelming and most of the time, students go down a rabbit hole, returning with very little data related to their topic. However, Google has a list of “operators” which are symbols and special characters that extend one’s web search capabilities within the Google Search Bar. They have created over 40 different search operators that help filter and refine web search results, making it easier to find appropriate and relevant content. Using one or more of them improves your web results. For example, when a student puts in the word “hunger” look what comes up:
Now at this point, there are 3 predictable things that students are going to do:
- click on Hunger by Wikipedia, feeling pretty confident that they got all the information they need,
- or they going to start watching one of those videos (wholly off the topic, but can’t resist the urge to be entertained)
- or they will recognize that their search term wasn’t specific enough to warrant quality result and put in new search terms.
We want to develop this last behavior as a research skill. We want to them to be thinking critically, solving problems and developing resiliency, and believe it or not, simply exploring search operators will give them a huge leg up on cultivating these behaviors. Because, as you can see, none of these web results would be particularly helpful in finding information related to our Sustainable Development Goal of “Zero Hunger”, and if you put in “Zero Hunger”, still 35,000,000 results come up. So let’s take a look at some search operators that can help students conduct research. In the charts below, you will notice the search operator in the left column, while the right-hand side explains how it works and some considerations that we need to be mindful of.
I created a video tutorial to show how the search operators make a significant difference in generating more relevant and useful research on the internet:
It is my hope that you can see the impact of these operators in action. However, I’d like also like to share with you another amazing way to do research online which works great if you teach older students (think High School) or you are personally working a degree program: Google Scholar, it takes internet research to another level.
Google Scholar provides a simple way to broadly search for scholarly literature. From one place, you can search across many disciplines and sources: articles, theses, books, abstracts and court opinions, from academic publishers, professional societies, online repositories, universities and other web sites. Google Scholar helps you find relevant work across the world of scholarly research.
*This is the 2nd of our Digital Lunch series, in which using Google Apps for Education training was used to support teaching the Sustainable Development Goals put forth by the United Nations. In this lunch hour training sessions, participates were exposed to SDG #2: No Hunger and the operator terms used for Google Search. This blog post gives an overview of the training.
Developing learners as leaders is my joy! I am committed and passionate International Baccaluearate (IB) educator who loves cracking jokes, jumping on trampolines and reading books. When I’m not playing Minecraft with my daughter, I work on empowering others in order to create a future that works for everyone.
