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!