Search Progress: how to find the right sources for your research projects

Search Progress, the new tool from Microsoft, promises to make the searching tasks much easier, allowing students to look up the right sources when researching for a school project. The tool is meant to build critical thinking and information literacy, by encouraging teachers to assign more research projects and customize the sources for them, and students to use it to educate themselves on the subject by searching for the sources.

Search Progress is rolling out this week and it will be available to teachers and students everywhere.

Search Progress: how to use it

As Microsoft wants to promote information literacy, teachers can use the tool to assign a research project and customize its sources for it, while students can use it to search for those sources. Once the projects are complete, teachers can then review the students’ search progress and submissions.

Search Progress is integrated into Microsoft Teams, and the platform will allow you to customize the number of your sources, assign keywords to them and even request a reflection input on these sources.

On the other side, students will be able to look up for the sources inside the platform, without having to run into ads or being distracted by other forms of content, as looking up on an Internet browser usually does.

Microsoft also announced that they will be partnering up with experts from education to build assignments and projects that will make the best use of the platform’s capabilities. Plus, students will be able to use this tool on their tablets, so they could work on their projects from anywhere.

And it doesn’t stop here. Microsoft will also add a citation functionality that will allow students to copy citations from any browser and bring it into the Search Progress platform.

What do you think about this new tool from Microsoft?