I used various search strategies throughout the development of this resource. I have included my search strategy sheet below for perusal by any interested parties. Where the search strategy departed from this (e.g. the following of links or sudden changes in research terms), I have included a description of this on the appropriate resource page.
Evaluation of Search Strategy
My initial search string yielded very few results. I removed the 'online/offline' search string (refer below). This yielded more results but these tended to be consumption based. At this point I narrowed down the number of search engines I was using and broadened my terms significantly. This provided a much wider variety of results, including more practical resources and I decided to use this approach, suspecting the less formal language was yielding these resources.
After using 'writing websites for kids' as a more casual form of search, I used subsequent results to inform the string 'digital storytelling'. This opened up the results beyond ones mainly focused on writing – e.g. blog, google docs, or variations on these to multimedia results/results which could be utilised for teaching writing, but were not necessarily specifically designed for this purpose. Search results yielded a number of blogs which had curated writing/storytelling resources which were both web based and practical, and useful blogs for teachers. Results at this point began to offer more of the same, with slightly different packaging. Interestingly, more freeware results were coming up, particularly once Google, Yahoo & Bing stopped being used.
Review of Search Engines
I trialled several search engines for my initial search before mainly relying upon pinterest.com, duckduckgo.com and google.co.nz. Duckduckgo.com and Pinterest provided more practical resources whereas Google was useful for finding blogs which provided links for further resources connected to the topic. Duckduckgo.com also provided a smaller number of resources and boasted that it did not track your data.
Twitter's inbuilt search engine was trialled, but not included in the strategy sheet below because it consistently revealed 0 results. When I utilised it to search for specific tweets, it returned results for educators I could follow but I had to use other search engines to narrow down a final twitter feed for inclusion. This suggests I needed to explore search techniques specific to twitter.
Ask.com, yahoo.com and bing.com yielded some useful results, but were ensconced with ads and visually very unappealing. The results were very similar to those found on Google. Ask.com was the least useful search engine other than Twitter.
Key search terms included:
writ* OR creat* OR build*
Web app OR online OR offline OR internet OR web-based OR web based OR website OR Web2.0 OR web 3.0