Thing 9 : Search Tools Ninja

So I played around a lot with various search tools!  I am intrigued with introducing students to search tools other than Google!  Yes, it's my go to search tool simply out of habit!  Google has absolutely made my life easier BUT it isn't always the best or most appropriate search tool to use especially when working with elementary students.  I use DuckDuckGo with some regularity and I also introduce this tool to my 4th, 5th, and 6th grade students and explain how this search tool doesn't track your data and explain the relevance of that.

I did a search using Google, Million Short, and DuckDuckGo.  As you might expect, the results varied between the search engines.  However, the best results came from Google!  I was looking for  "Corinth, NY fun activities."  The top five results in Google were all relevant while the other search tools both gave my results about Corinth, Mississippi and some irrelevant pages about activities for Corinth, NY but it wasn't really about Corinth, NY.  I will have to revisit Million Short again and play around with it (I see a lesson !).  I checked out ScoopIt and found some great book trailers to use in my library! I'm not sure I will use this regularly but it's worth more time.  I did sign up for a free account.

I was excited to learn about Choosito! As I was able to get search results with grade/reading levels attached to them but to use the free version of this tool you are limited as to what you can access.  It appears that this company has done a really nice job of allowing students to think about and rate websites from the search results! Visually, I like the way your results appear and I think it's very kid friendly.  What I was really impressed with is how it allows students to actively participate in website evaluation which is so important, however, you must be a paid subscriber to access this! That's too bad.

PS - Many of Bill Bradley's links for search tools are dead links.  He hasn't updated this page so I'm not sure it's a very useful resource still.