Wednesday Web Tool: New Kid Friendly Search Engine- Kiddle Wednesday Web Tool: New Kid Friendly Search Engine- Kiddle

This week we are featuring a new kid friendly and safer internet search engine: Kiddle . To get started, visit: kiddle.co Kid...

Wednesday Web Tool: Search Engines for Students-Sweet Search and GoGooligans Wednesday Web Tool: Search Engines for Students-Sweet Search and GoGooligans

Today we are sharing two great educational search engines to help students find credible resources. It is an important skill for students t...

Wednesday Web Tool: Free Access to Ancestry Classroom, Fold3, and Newspapers.com Across our District! Wednesday Web Tool: Free Access to Ancestry Classroom, Fold3, and Newspapers.com Across our District!

This week we are excited to share news of access to three great research tools across our district!  A BIG thank you to Doug Pawlak at Riv...

Showing posts with label research tools. Show all posts
Showing posts with label research tools. Show all posts

Wednesday, January 6, 2016

Wednesday Web Tool: New Kid Friendly Search Engine- Kiddle

This week we are featuring a new kid friendly and safer internet search engine: Kiddle.

To get started, visit: kiddle.co


Kiddle is powered by Google and is a visual search engine.

Kiddle has some great features:
  • Automatic Google Safe Search to block most inappropriate and adult content.
  • Visual results with pictures and site thumbnails to give visual clues about what a website contains.
  • Large font for easy reading.
  • Kiddle does not collect any personally identifiable information and all logs are deleted after 24 hours.
  • Kiddle has an extensive search blocker that will not allow students to search for inappropriate terms.

Here is an example search for "Blue Whale Habitat":




Kiddle also allows you to search for images, news, and videos by clicking on the links above the search bar:

I hope you add Kiddle to your list of safer searching options for students!

Wednesday, January 28, 2015

Wednesday Web Tool: Search Engines for Students-Sweet Search and GoGooligans

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

Wednesday, January 14, 2015

Wednesday Web Tool: Free Access to Ancestry Classroom, Fold3, and Newspapers.com Across our District!

This week we are excited to share news of access to three great research tools across our district!  A BIG thank you to Doug Pawlak at Riverwood Middle for securing access for our district.

The first new tool is access to Ancestry Classroom:


Ancestry Classroom has all the features of Ancestry personal accounts except that you cannot save information to a personal account. You can save information to your Google Drive or print it. Ancestry Classroom also features some great printables for your students such as family trees and a research journal. Besides searching for your own family linage, a great idea is to have students research a historically important or famous person.

Next, our district now has access to Fold3, a massive online database of military records.


Fold3 is an amazing resource not only for social studies subjects but for any military research topic. Please note that our access is limited to topics and free articles. The personal military record search is not included in our access.

Lastly, Newspapers.com is now accessible to our district.


Newspapers.com features newspapers from across the United States from the 1700's to 2000. Editions of the Raleigh News and Observer are available from 1880 to 1923. This is a great way to get free primary sources for your classroom. Our free access does not allow saving to a personal account but you can save articles and clippings to your Google Drive as well as print them.

A note about "District" access...you should be able to access all three of these websites from any district owned device on a district campus. Access may not work with any device using the guest network or with district devices that are off campus.

I hope you take advantage of these great resources that are now available to our district!

Questions or Comments?
Please email me at: pamelabatchelor@johnston.k12.nc.us