Search is a vital skill: How Napier Boys’ High School uses Microsoft’s Search Coach to improve digital literacy and research

The value of Search Coach in Microsoft Teams

For years, the school has used Microsoft 365 for delivering and organizing educational content and has found Microsoft Teams essential to curricular success. John Stapley, Head of Digital Technology at Napier, says, “There’s a huge value to Teams, to having all the content in one place and using it as a communication tool.” John further explains how Search Coach adoption in Teams came about: “We looked at other key skills like ‘let's teach them how to use Word and Excel better.’ After that, we wanted to teach them to research online. We were constantly trying to help them understand how to phrase a search question and to get a quality result. That’s when we learned Search Coach was available in Teams. For me, it was a brilliant bit of timing.”

John emphasizes the real benefit of Search Coach is equipping students with tools to be more proficient at search, one of the fundamental ways that students use computers in school. It is also one of the most important things these future adults will do long after they’ve graduated. 

Search Coach domain filter enables students to narrow which websites will be included in their query

A couple of the most powerful features revolve around assessing the validity of sources and the content they provide. A fact-checking filter adds an objective set of fact-check websites, and a partnership with NewsGuard provides a sense of whether sources returned from the search query can be trusted. Students who click on NewsGuard receive a detailed analysis of a site’s rating, as well as a summary score. This can prompt more critical thinking about information retrieved so students can assess the value of its contribution to whatever project they are undertaking. John and his team really like this capability because, “now every site has a rating that helps generate different perspectives and controls where your information is coming from.”

Delivering on digital literacy through critical skill-building

When they realized the power of Search Coach to improve student research, John and his team immediately began developing a full Search Coach course using some of the already published lesson plans, adding their own curricula, and organizing it into units and chapters. They have continued to refine the course, and the results are already paying dividends.

“Students don’t often know how to use search effectively. Microsoft Excel is a great model for comparison: lots of people use Excel yet they probably use less than 10% of what Excel can do for them, even though they think they are good at using it. This is the same delta with online search—people go to the Internet and search to get answers and find some information, but they rarely look at the results and think, ‘is this really true? Is this the best information I could find? Am I conning myself and learning something that is not accurate?’ That’s what Search Coach does—it turns students into critical thinkers and researchers,” says John. 

The goal of John’s work is not only to get students to succeed, but also to help them improve the ways they use and find information throughout the rest of their academic and professional lives. “When you give a student a pen, they are not going back to using a pencil. When they have learned to search effectively, they are not going back to their old ways of searching. I know it’s trickling down, because I see effective search skills are being used throughout the school. I see them doing stuff that students were not doing two years ago and that excites me, because we want our school to be at the very front edge of IT.”

Microsoft Search Coach provides John and his students a much-needed boost to critical skills that will define ongoing learning and information retrieval over the lifetime of a student. “We want to teach students their computer is a tool,” he says, “something they can use in every subject.” And now, John believes they can. “The students who have learned how to search,” he explains, “can now work out what it is they want to know and find an answer. For me, that is the difference. I am turning out students that have digital literacy, students that finally know how to do online research.”

Call it future-ready skills, or 21st-century learning, or just a commitment to excellence. Search Coach has shown students how to become better researchers and, in the process, sharpened their critical thinking skills, maintaining a Napier tradition of developing informed and successful future citizens.