We have a saying in my circle of friends that… ‘Assumption is the mother of all #@*# ups’. The saying works on so many levels… school, classroom, dealing with management, dealing with systems administrators and many other facets of ‘the real world’. 
That said, I must admit that I’ve never one to hide my ignorance… so I need to confess that I made an assumption last week that contributed to a little inefficiency. I assumed that teachers and students knew that there are a variety of web search tools available on the Internet that make certain purposes more efficient. i.e. finding the best Science and Maths sites on the Internet is much easier in a child friendly search engine rather than the, ‘Search Engine of Default’.
All that said, last week I took a step back and introduced the teachers and students to a variety of child friendly search engines. The feedback from the teachers was great as they didn’t know these resources existed and the results that the students achieved was very good as they used tools more appropriate to the task.
Let us hope that everyone can now transfer this learning to search tasks that they conduct in the future
Go on… explore a few of these…
KidsClick Go To KidsClick
Primary School.com.au – This is a site put together by a classroom teacher and is filled with useful sites for all areas of study.
Yahoo Kids – This one doesn’t work too well at school but is fantastic at home.
Go To YahooKids
Ask Jeeves 4 Kids – Try the books on the side Go To Ask Jeeves 4 Kids
Google Student Directory – Another excellent site for home:)The Google Student Directory
Use these sites for more ‘kid friendly’ information.
Adrian
You should also tell them about http://www.edusafe.us! It is an educator guided search engine. Teachers, Admins and techs can all add sites to this Google powered search engine. It forces Safe Search to be on at all times and only searches sites that have been added by educators.
Wayne
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