Open and Guided Search

I believe that children should always have a guided search, that parents and teachers should use Kid-friendly Search Engines or use  Web-based bookmarks. Another option is to use Google Custom Search. This way we  can control the websites that my students visits (at least in theclassroom). Here is an example of a Google Custom Search that I created for Thanksgiving.



However our students has to learn how to search effectively somehow. It is an important skills that they need to learn in this fast paced world of change. Why not teach them how to use Advanced search then? Using advanced search offers a lot of advantages. One of which is we would have more relevant results by putting in an exact phrase or making sure the results contain a certain word or typing specific words that we don’t want to appear in our search selections. This is important because our students need not be overwhelmed with the number of results that they have to check if they use a regular search. We can also choose to display the results’ reading level, this feature really help if we are looking for materials suited for our class. In addition we can specify the file type or file format that we need for example if you are using Google Advanced Search to look for a presentation choose for .ppt files likewise if we are searching if there are Google earth tours  about the voyage of the pilgrims we can choose the Google Earth KMZ (.kmz) file, if we are looking for video content or educational games related to the topic, we can choose Shockwave Flash (.swf) under the drop down menu of File Type.  We can even specify domains that will be displayed in our results by choosing .edu or .gov for example. We can add filter by clicking the Safe Search option to avoid inappropriate contents in the results displayed. What’s more if we are looking for news or time sensitive content we can use the date option by choosing past 24 hours. If we are looking for an image that we want to modify for the class website we can specify free to use share and modify under the usage right filter. All of this takes just a minute or so and yet we’ll be saving ourselves a lot of time otherwise wasted wading through irrelevant or unwanted results. By guiding the students how to search for a particular topic such as  Thanksgiving, we are giving them a valuable skill that they will need to get to the valuable resources that the web offers.