A few times recently at conferences or on training days I have referred to ways of making an internet search more accurate and on target. A few of you have asked for some more guidance with this.

1. Banish tension by using extensions.

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One of the best ways to search for a file is to add the file extension, or file type, you are looking for.

(All file extensions are preceded by a dot (or full stop) and tell the computer which program or programs are to be used to open that kind of file.)

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This can be useful when looking up movie files, images, sounds, and many other document formats.

For example, if you are doing your science planning and are about to spend hours making a PowerPoint presentation about the parts of a plant, save your time.

Try a search for “parts of a plant” and you will come up with hundreds of results.

However, now add “.ppt” (one of the file extensions for PowerPoint) and you will find many, and, some of them, very good presentations about plants and their anatomy. (You could also use “.pps”)

Below are just some of the main “file extension” labels you might find useful in narrowing down a search.

If you are looking for an audio clip, try the name you want (e.g. dog barking, or the name of a TV theme) and one of the following extensions (remembering to put a “dot” before the group of letters)
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Films and movie clips might be followed by one of these extensions:

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Pictures or graphics:
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Word documents:

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Flash files e.g. whiteboard activities:

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There are many other file extensions, but these might get you going to begin with.

Happy hunting!

Do let me know of any obvious (or less obvious) ones I’ve missed.

Thanks Geoff for the reminder of .pdf for… well… pdfs.

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