Every six months someone posts a message on the eTech Ohio listserv that asks this question: Can anyone share their school’s Acceptable Use Policy with us?
Four different times I have posted this message to the list that explains how to use Google to find all the AUPs anyone would ever want.
Here are ONE THOUSAND AND TEN in PDF format, all on Ohio K12 web servers.
+filetype:pdf +site:k12.oh.us +”acceptable use policy”
You can tweak the search strings to find very specific content… like “photos” or “publishing guidelines”, etc.
Here are 38 in DOC format
+filetype:doc +site:k12.oh.us +”acceptable use policy”
If you switch the search to “aup”, here are a couple hundred more
The link below will take you to Google and do a search on web sites ending in K12.OH.US (all K12 schools in Ohio) for PDF documents containing the exact phrase “acceptable use policy”.
Let me explain the key search features that are used in this search.
FILETYPE:
This filter will only return the file type that corresponds to the file extension used in the search string.
DOC – Word Document
PDF – Adobe PDF
XLS – Excel
PPT – PowerPoint
If you want to find a PowerPoint that talks about Global Warming, search for
Note: there is no space between the colon and the file extension.
Notice two other things in the above search. A plus sign in front of each term forces that term to show up in the search result. Also the quotes around the phrase “global warming” will force those two words to show up in that exact order (the word “global” immediately before the word “warming”). If you search for
you get about 44,000 PowerPoint files. If you change it to
You get 55,000. The increase is due to the fact that the second search does not require the two words to be one after the other. Once slide could have the word “global” and a completely different slide could have the word “warming”.
SITE:
This keyword is really handy. It will limit the results to URLs that meet the specified requirements. You can use this one to have Google search a whole web site even if the site has no search engine of its own. The use looks like this
This search locates every web page on the UF web site with the exact phrase “educational technology”. Because the “root” of the domain was used, the search finds pages on
http://www.findlay.edu
http://homepages.findlay.edu
If you wanted pages at a more specific sub-domain, include it in the search
Using the SITE keyword, it is easy to find school web pages in Ohio using
This will find every school from ada.k12.oh.us to zanesville.k12.oh.us and all the ones in between. If you are looking for a document on one of those school sites, you can combine keywords like this
This search generated a list of more than 1600 PowerPoint files all on Ohio school web sites.
Making this modification:
Produces six PowerPoint presentations from Ohio schools that have the phrase “global warming” somewhere in the presentation.
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