Tuesday, March 12, 2013

Thing 9

I decided to focus on search engines for this activity. I tend to always use Google for my personal searches and I find the kids tend to head to that first as well. I am always a little anxious about my students searching on the internet and I want to make sure they are using appropriate sites. I also realize that they could use some instruction in how to search correctly. I played around with SweetSearch and KidRex. I like the results I got and I think both of these search engines would be useful for my fifth graders. I added them to my research folder in ikeepbookmarks and the next time we do research I will have them use these search engines. I also played around with InstraGrok for while. I found this site to be very interesting. I like the way it creates a concept map for a topic and allows you to add the sites, images, and information that you think is most useful. I could see using this as a teacher to create a map of a topic to share with students. It would allow me to put all the important sites and information in one place to use as I teach about a topic. I can also see how students would use this to collect information on a specific topic. The site is free, but you can pay $35 for a year so that each student can have an account. It also has a journal feature where it lists all of your information in a word processing document that you can then manipulate in a variety of ways. I would like to spend more time using this site and possibly set up accounts for my students in the future. I also looked at Bing vs. Google and while I found them to be similar, I think I will explore Bing more in the future to see how the results differ from Google. Since I have used Google so much in the past, I am interested in exploring more of the lessons on power searching with Google. I find my students doing more and more research, even for things I hadn't planned to be research projects. As research becomes more a part of our daily instruction, I want to be sure I have the tools to help the students find what they are looking for. Teaching is becoming less about providing students with information, and more about helping them to acquire the information they are looking for.

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