Tuesday, February 26, 2008

Technology Standards - Information Acquisition: Search Engines

My second blog is about students using search engines. There are many kid-friendly search engines available. I found several that I prefer.

As a science teacher, I have frequently used http://kids.yahoo.com/ (previously yahooligans). This site has lots of information about animals for us to research when we are working on life science and talking about animals. It also has a reference tab and encyclopedia source. The copyright on the pages I viewed was 2007 Yahoo! Inc.

Another interesting site I found was http://www.askforkids.com/. This is the kid version of the Ask Jeeves site. This site opens up to a very kid-friendly page and has a stack of books to the right of the search request line that you can click on to be subject specific.

The Google kid-friendly search engine is found at http://www.safekids.com/. It is filtered automatically by Google.

The sites listed are just a few of the many sites for children found when doing a general search for 'search engines for kids'. Most of the sites I visited use bright, vivid, colors and some even have cartoon characters to welcome children. The Google site did not have an outstanding opening page like the others but was much like the regular Google search page.

I think that with the abundance of sites that are geared toward searching the WWW and also toward children, students should not have a problem finding valid and valuable information on the 'net.

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