Alternative Search Tools to Google for Kids

We all do it, just log onto Google to find the information or image we need, and the kids do it too. The following are some great alternatives to use with your class.
A good strategy is to mix it up – ask them to specifically find resources using different search engines.
Some kids are definitely more visual learners, so some search engines are terrific for them. Others present their findings in very unusual ways that are excellent resources in themselves.
Advanced searching is a breeze as well with some well designed search engines that allow for Boolean searching without your students even knowing what they are doing!

Here’s some of the best:

Spezify A visual search engine, results are given in multimedia rich format. It is a great ‘big picture’ tool and includes blogs and tweets on the subject area as well – therefore including social networking into the mix, visuals including images and videos are presented – a draw back is the download time of some of the images – but it’s a great tool to browse through.
Search-Cube Giving a visual result display, Search cube grabs its results from Google and site preview thumbnails from Thumbshots, then combines them in a 3D cube that you can rotate freely either with your mouse or keyboard.
Mashpedia Mashpedia is a web application structured thematically around topics, like in an encyclopedia. It integrates contents loaded from different online sources under one single interface, providing a wide spectrum of digital contents and up-to-the-minute data. For every valid topic, Mashpedia presents a list of modules with content loaded in real-time from multiple web services, categorized by media type or data source. By jumping modules, you'll find fresh data and digital media from Newspapers, Magazines, Blogs, Books, Wikipedia, Youtube, Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, Social Answers and additional online resources.
What's clearly missing here are which results are worth clicking on, something you get with Google's search result relevance algorithm, however, on the flip side (literally), you get to see a lot more results at once, and with a little visual flair.

Duck Duck Go Duck Duck Go is an Internet search engine that makes it easier to find the information you're looking for. When you search a topic, in addition to links, it provides a synopsis of that topic with zero clicks. Duck Duck Go also gives you links to related topics, news, and images on the same page.

Kigose From yahoo Kids: Kid safe Kigose is a website designed for students and teachers to find educational resources. Kigose only includes public websites that are for educational purposes only. The list of the websites included are suggested by teachers, parents and students.

Boolify: The advent of the internet increased the amount of information available to the general public exponentially. The people of Boolify, joined together because they realized that while the amount of available information had increased, the tools to find it were not being properly taught to children. Boolify is a tool that enables students to be able to visualize the search process by using puzzle pieces to put their search together. Boolify uses the Google Safe Search engine so results are appropriate for children and it teaches children to use proper Boolean searches. While aimed at primary and middle-school children, Boolify is a great tool for anyone who is not familiar with the ins and outs of Boolean searching.

Sortfix: Search Bing, Google and twitter at the same time. It does all the hard work and leaves you only the easy part. It fetches the search results from Google, Bing and Twitter in one interface. Behind the scene an intelligent algorithm does the work – by scanning and examining the results, it reveals the significant keywords and terms that will help you to define a better question. Then comes the best part, by using SortFix’s unique interface you can play with the suggested keywords, and create your own individual and precise query, and when you ask a precise question you usually get the right answer.
SortFix has 4 search sections on the search results page:
1. Power Words – Keywords that are automatically filled after checking the relevancy with the searched term.
2. Add To Search – The actual entered keyword by user.
3. Remove – Drag the search terms and drop in this box to exclude from search results.
4. Dictionary – Drag and Drop any keyword in this box to see the term’s definition instantly.
Comparison Search Glean Comparison Search (formerly All Sides at Boolify) is a tool designed to help its users explicitly explore differing points of view about a topic. By providing a fluid scaffolding structure for the comparative research process, it is our intent to help researchers develop a keener, more refined ability to explore their own conceptions vis a vis differing views.
Quintura for Kids is powered by Yahoo. It gives a more visual way of searching using a keyword cloud. You start off your search with a keyword in the text box and then modify it with any of the keywords in the cloud. Quintura displays five results per page. You may miss it, but clicking on the surrounding icons takes you to the five preset search categories – Music, History, Animals, Sports and recreation, and Games.

So much to choose from here, but when introducing students to the tools, make sure you highlight the very best one for the job.

Strategies for improving technology skills for teachers

After just finishing off my four last essays for my post grad course, one of which was about ICT and teacher PD, I got to thinking how can teachers best manager their own personal IT professional development needs. We all know that we are all teachers of literacy and numeracy and now increasingly we are all teachers of ICT.
This can be daunting for some teachers as its already a very busy profession. So how best to go about improving technology skill and bringing it into your teaching.
There are some very simple ideas that can gradually be added to your weekly and yearly schedule.
1) Social networking. OK this seems a bit drastic - sites such as Facebook many people like to keep just amongst their friends, but add in a couple of really informative groups or people to your network and while you spend a bit of time browsing your friends news and updating yourself, you might stumble across something interesting to follow up. A couple of good people/groups to follow on Facebook are:
Jeff Utrecht; Free technology for teachers;ISTE and Education World.
There are lots of others out there.
2) Join Twitter. You might feel a bit awkward, but honestly its been my best professional development tool for some time now. Join up - that takes about 60 seconds and find some people to follow. At first you might feel a bit self conscious about talking about yourself, but 140 characters isn't too burdensome and you can limit your own tweeting to one tweet every few days or once a week to start. If technology is the thing you want to improve, link up with Ed tech specialists, other teachers are also talking about all sorts of things. They are so generous with their ideas and will link you out to lots of amazing things on the web that they have tried or are thinking about.
Something new I just gleaned from Twitter is something called Read it Later. Sign up to this site and you can add a bookmarklet to your browser. Just tag something you think might be interesting and 'read it later' when you have time. Perhaps make half an hour a week set aside to trawl through these and you'll be surprised at what you find.
3) Add sites like Twitter, Facebook and Read it Later to your iphone or Android phone and when you are stuck at a bus stop, waiting for your friend at a cafe or have 5 minutes and dont want to start up the computer, you can do a little IT PD!
4) At the beginning of each school year and term, we set our students some personal and academic goals - we should probably do the same for ourselves. Its really satisfying to select a number of things you'd like to achieve in a year and tick them off as you go through.
Keep it simple to start you could:
- commit to developing skills in one new software program
- create one task per UOI that emmerses some simple computer use eg graphing, looking up dictionary.com, brainstorming.
- choose one IT PD per year to attend and share with your colleagues
- create one interactive whiteboard lesson per unit of inquiry through the year.
- book in a session with the ICT integrator to embed some higher end skills into your lessons, make sure that session has some computer 'play time' for you, its the best way to learn.
- At grade meetings spend 5 minutes sharing some new ICT sites you've come across that might be helpful to everyone.

Once you've started with these simple steps, you might begin a photo-blog ( 365 project is an excellent vehicle to force you online each day to upload an image) or a reflective blog of your own. It doesn't even need to be about school stuff - perhaps you have a passion about something else that can be the catalyst for sharing in the online world.

Before you know it you'll be developing some good skills, feel confident about using IT in your lessons and the kids will love it!

Best of all, doing these few easy things will assist with any teachers attempting to meet the ICT skills standards when going for accreditation.
Good luck and importantly don't forget to share what you learn with your colleagues.

WatchKnow

WatchKnow is an initiative by Dr Larry Sanger, the co-founder of Wikipedia. It is a collection of online videos for education K-12. The beauty of WatchKnow, as opposed to other video sharing and collection websites is that you can collect videos from many sharing sites on the internet for example YouTube, SlideShare, Google Videos, Vimeo - to name a few.
WatchKnow has indexed over 20,000 educational videos, placing them into a directory of over 3,000 categories. The videos are available without any registration or fees to teachers in the classroom and to students at home 24/7. Users can dive into the innovative directory or search for videos by subject and age level. Video titles, descriptions, age level information, and ratings are all edited for usefulness. The Web site invites broad participation in a new kind of wiki system, guided by teachers.
So why not create a class, a grade or a specialist area page in WatchKnow Classroom and add all the videos and slideshows that you will use in your teaching. Alternatively organisations such as the library can start to create a repository of videos that the whole school can use. There's an introductory video on this page to get you going.
This is a very exciting initiative and one which is set to grow to 50,000 videos.

Trending Tech

This blog has been created to assist teachers at the school and others to find out about some of the emerging ideas in Educational Technology. Posts will highlight new tools, ways to integrate them into our PYP curriculum and specialist areas and some bigger picture ideas that are floating out there.
Some things will not be so new, but will be be on the blog as a reminder of some great tried and tested tools and student tasks, or there might just be a new slant on an old idea.
I'll be putting lots of links in to sites and online tools - photos and videos.
As we move towards more computers in the school and the investigation of mobile devices - I'll be reporting on progress and implementation.
In all I hope its a useful space for teachers to introduce new ways to integrate technology into the curriculum.