Narrowing the search with Boolean logic

I discovered a great site which can be used with children to teach them Boolean logic in searching for information. The site is boolify.org It is a simple tool to use and children can easily see when their searches result in too many or too few results.




I typed in inquiry based projects and upper primary school and came up with one result which was totally unrelated to the information I was looking for. My next attempt was to type in inquiry based projects AND primary school OR elementary school which produced 138 results, wishing to narrow the search down, I backtracked and removed the OR elementary school, which produced 37 results which was far more manageable, but there were many unuseful results. Again I backtracked and typed in inquiy based projects AND english AND primary school, which produced 29 results - but none of the results proved useful. I have concluded that it is too difficult to actually narrow down inquiry based projects in english, but to look for broader searches and adapt that information to the project set for the students in my class.

On further searches for tools to use to teach children, I discovered Rockwell Schrock's website entitled The Boolean Machine, which explains quite clearly the use of AND, OR and NOT. See illustrations above.