Sunday, March 23, 2008
Google Custom Search
In my previous post I blathered on about how I feel children (at some age) need to learn how to search Google (or whatever is the predominant search tool) in all of its massiveness. Google has created a tool that may provide a nice bridge for instructors that are trying to do just that. A good teacher builds bridges for children from the content they know to the content they don't. Google allows us to do that. They allow users to build custom search engines. http://www.google.com/coop/cse/ With the custom search engine a teacher could pre-search for children finding 10, 20, 30 or even more sites that they think are useful and/or safe for children. The teacher doesn't create a list of sites that they child may use like the old link page on our websites. Rather the student still uses Google to do their searching but the search is limited to the data contained on just those predefined websites. Pretty cool use of their technology and bravo for Google on making another tool available to its users for FREE.
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2 comments:
Your thinking about filters and custom searches was helpful to me, as our school struggles with the competing values of "safe search" and open inquiry. Apart from the exposure to vitriolic, biased, unreliable sites, I'm not sure it's good teaching just to let 'em loose. At the very least the teacher should know what the most informative sites are for topics s/he assigns.
I agree with the balanced approach you talk about: use filters but give teachers the capacity to override. We can't make the internet safe for children, but through teaching, we can make children safe for the internet.
A teacher asked me about our "blogging policy" We have none, of course, other than our general acceptable use policy. I tend to favor the use of discussion boards within Blackboard or, in our case, Edline. I am constantly amazed at the shallowness, ranting nature of so many comments. One starts with an interesting thread from the New York Times, for example, and the comments quickly degenerate to ad hominem rants. What's your view on blogging in the classroom?
David-
Thanks for the comment and great thinking. Our students have access to Google with filters coming thru the county ed. system. The systems are pretty reliable...although not fool proof and unfortunately there is no way for a teacher to override...they must email someone in another part of campus to override. How fast it gets overriden depends. Needless to say, not fast enough for a student trying to research.
I blog as a way to try to provide some extra PD to my stuff. So I am very in favor of blogging for teachers. I am not sure if your question refers to students or teachers. I am in an elementary school located in a somewhat conservative district/city so I would be very hesitant to have the students blog. However, one of our HS English teachers has started having her students blog as an extension of her writing class. Like you though...we have no "official" blogging policy. We also had some ES students blog as part of a Thinkquest contest. Of course...Thinkquest does not allow blogs or wikis as part of their submission.
However, if I found a project that blogs were an essential part of (collaborative communications with the outside world) I would feel comfortable enough to go my principal and ask for permission to pilot with a small group of students. Good luck!
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