Thing 10: Search Tools Ninja

Okay, so I am exploring this topic both for personal reasons as I keep learning new tricks to find things better (as mentioned in the Update on Thing 24 in a previous post) and for professional reasons because I try to teach my students, especially in third grade, to be savvy searchers.  I would love to have links to better child-friendly search engines.

I have showed them www.Kiddle.co, but they aren't always reliable or appropriate sites either.  Lately, they seem to be better however.

SweetSearch seems to be a viable option.  Startpage looks like something I want to share with my 5th graders.  Now that we have discussed how big data tracks them everywhere, they are more aware of it and mention it often.  They might like to use this option to avoid the tracking.

Interestingly, random searching for topics to test the various search engines with found me DOGOnews which looks interesting.  It is a current events style site for kids, like Tween Tribune or NewsELA, but apparently without the ability to search by reading level.  Still it is an interesting site to remember.  (I also found https://mrsgraysms.weebly.com/ which has interesting links that I might want to explore in the future.)  Another interesting find, is OneTab which looks like a really good Chrome extension.  I will have to research it more, but as I am the queen of tabs with two monitors at school and only one at home, this looks promising!

I personally have Duck Duck Go as one of the tabs that opens automatically on my computer at home.  At school it seems pointless as I'm using Google Chrome within a school district that is thoroughly Google.  We use Google Classroom, Google Suite, Google Calendars, gmail, the whole nine yards.

I looked into the Custom Search Engines.  I looked at  Mrs. Gray’s Research Site for Kids. Although I see the appeal, it would be tough to target enough sites that are at a relevant reading level to cover what the children might want to search for.  Mrs. Gray's seems to favor the New York Times, which while it is reputable, is not exactly at the reading level of "kids" as I know them.  Maybe it would work better for teenagers.  She does seem to have managed to cover a huge variety of topics in a safe way.
Building a custom search engine could work well for individual projects though.  For example, for my third grade frog project I could probably easily compile a list of sites that cover the information and are reputable.  The downside is that the students aren't really learning how to judge a website and how to verify the information.  It solves one problem, but creates another.

I did try creating a custom search that would search the databases we use most frequently at school.  I even added it to my website on the databases page.  If kids like it, I might move it to the front page.  The unfortunate part is that it includes ads.  I had to make it with my personal google credentials as my school ones wouldn't work. That is very disappointing.  It said, "We are sorry, but you do not have access to this service. Please contact your Organization Administrator for access." Obviously, I can try to get them to change this, but since our IT department is NERIC based, the decisions seem to be made more globally than locally sometimes.  I do wonder how if I will remember how to find my custom search should I want to edit it in the future.

I would love the LibGuides option, but I don't have the budget at school for it.

I liked the article 11 Great Kids Safe Search Engines.  It gives a brief view of if it is ad free or not as well as a brief description of the search engines pros and cons.

Six easy ways to tell if that viral story is a hoax was interesting to read, but certainly not something to share with my students.  My fifth graders and I have discussed snopes.com though and the need to investigate before you believe the latest posts.

I briefly checked out Five Tips for Teaching Students How to Research and Filter Information.  It was interesting, but even better was the link to "Kathy Schrock’s PDF document which demonstrates how you can progressively teach citation from grades 1 to 6."  That gives me an idea of how others deal with the fact that young kids just can't handle everything required of an MLA citation for a website.  My students are great with copying the book citation from Destiny Quest or the citations on sites like World Book, but a regular website is tough - frankly, it is even tough for me.  I have a tendency to use something like NoodleTools to get the citation correct.  She mentions in Staying Organized the option of creating a "system for students to organize their information while they’re searching."  I try to do that, but sometimes it feels as if I am doing too much of the work.  Then again, trying to do index cards with fifth grade was a nightmare (despite taping zip bags into their folders to keep them safe) that I finally ditched this year.

Well, I've spent a long time with this topic, so I guess I will leave Power Searching with Google and How to Live Without Google that I wanted to read for myself for another time.  I sure hope, Polly, that you manage to leave all of your great resources up for us to consult in the future.

BTW, sorry about the weird highlight.  I don't know what I am doing wrong.  This time, I did not start in GoogleDocs or Word.  I just typed right into Blogger, but I still get this weird formatting.