Searches

This is the time of year when most grades work on finding factual information from websites. Younger children use online directories like Enchanted Learning or Fact Monster. Older students learn to form simple questions about their inquiries, and to then pinpoint the important terms to use as keywords in their searches. We talk a lot about Google as the search engine of choice for many adults (myself included!) and why it's not a viable option for students. In class we searched for the term kites; using a Google search, we netted about 26,000,000 hits! How's a student to find relevant and readable information with overwhelming results like that?

There are search engines built specifically for kids that index only websites with content suitable for student use. These are the search tools we want children to turn to first. Search engines like Ask Kids, KidsClick, Yahoo! Kids, Quintura Kids, Sweet Search 4 Me - there are more, and they usually suffice. If they don't, perhaps then we turn to Google - with "Safe Search" options turned on and using carefully chosen keywords in our search.

Links to kids' search engines are listed in the sidebar on this blog, right under the weather link. For easy access, tudents also have them bookmarked through their web browser on computers at school.

Many Ways to Concord

Using GoogleMaps, third graders tracked many different routes to get from New Hampton to Concord - straight down Route 93, south on 132 to Route 4, out through Bristol and Franklin...

We discussed how the internet is a lot like the roads to Concord. There are so many different ways to get from the student to the information the student seeks! We learned about effective searching and choosing keywords that will lead to the correct information. We learned about directories and saw how they're set up in categories and subcategories.

We tried out the search engine and directory features for YahooKids, KidsClick, AskKids, and Quintara for Kids. We looked at the number of hits for a keyword using KidsClick and compared it to the same search using Google. Kids' search engines usually only show results that are readable and useful for students, making finding what we want a LOT easier!