Today we are sharing two great educational search engines to help students find credible resources. It is an important skill for students to be able to determine source reliability and these search engines give students a "smaller pool" of resources to wade in to find the best information for their projects.
Our first search engine is Sweet Search, www.sweetsearch.com
Sweet Search gives peer reviewed resources to students. Their is also a biography section and a social studies section with great information about historical events and famous figures. A quick search for "Polar Bears" gives resources from the National Wildlife Federation and National Geographic as the top links.
The next search engine is GoGooligans, www.gogooligans.com
GoGooligans is a safe search engine for elementary and middle school students. It has over 17,000 peer reviewed resources that it searches. My search for "Polar Bears" gave great resources in a kid friendly format. The font on GoGooligans is larger than normal and there are many search parameters you can change such as the level of searching, resources from a particular part of the world, or format. GoGooligans also has a spell checker for students to check their search terms.
Here is what my search results found:
Regardless of which search engine your students use, nothing takes the place of digital citizenship and teacher monitoring. Here are some great resources to introduce the topics of safe web searching and website credibility to your students:
Questions or Comments?
Please email me at: pamelabatchelor@johnston.k12.nc.us