Thing #4--Searching the Web

For this excercise, we were shown several different search engines like webcrawler.com, ask.com, and google.com. It was a great refresher course for me because I had totally forgotten about a few of them. Webcrawler used to be one of my favorite search engines long before Google was out on the market and I forgot how easy it is to use them. But more importantly that Webcrawler is a "metacrawler" or a meta search engine, which means it looks at three or four search engines instead of just one at a time. It then pulls the best info from those sites and gives you the top of the top of the lists.

So how do I plan to use this in the classroom? I am going to start showing the kids how to use the various search engines and their purposes along with teaching them how to use them wisely, especially the younger kids. I would hate for inappropriate material to come up in our Christian School setting.

One of the other tools I plan to use is to develop a web search exercise where they will have to use the various search engines to see how they work and what is the same and different about each one of them. This is a great way to rethink how we use the web!

Thing #3, iGoogle Suite

Well, this is now my third thing to complete. I am really glad I have been doing the Clovis 23 things challenge this year. I have been learning a lot already about rethinking my teaching strategies for Computers and the classroom. I have students one day a week, but with this setup, I could teach my students 24/7/365.

The iGoogle suite has been very informative. I have already been "playing" with some of the materials, such as this blog and a few others I use, but not in the way that is being suggested here. I never thought of having the students create their own, iGoogle account in order to follow blogs, or share calendars, or other neat tools. I have seen the collaborative tools for the Google Docs before, but now I'm thinking that might just be a better way to do some things.

I have already sent this course info on to a few colleagues so it will be interesting to see how they respond. It would be great to have some of this in place by this fall, or at least start working with it. I have been reluctant to require the students to have an e-mail for several reasons, but I think I may be seeing the true benefits of this along with a personal iGoogle start page. Only time will tell.