 |
| A snapshot of Sweet Search |
My Web 2.0 for this week is Sweet Search. It is a site where your students can safely search online through filters. Instead of watching over your students during research on Google, Yahoo, or other search engines, Sweet Search watches them for you. Many of the sites have been pre-approved from other educators, media center specialists, and others in the education realm. I like this idea. Although my school restricts certain websites, and add more when necessary, there are always ways around them, especially if students know anything about proxies.
There are also different versions of Sweet Search, such as SweetSearch2Day, a site where students can learn something new every day. SweetSites has grade level appropriate and subject related searches. SweetSearch4Me is SweetSearch's engine for emerging, or new users to the internet, as you can bookmark sites and link to your Facebook and other networking sites. SweetSearch Biographies profiles over 1000 important people, such as entertainers, explorers, and philanthropists. Most likely, I would use the latter site in general because in Social Studies, we are constantly learning about important people in history. I rather students use this site instead of "looking on Google" as they say or on Wikipedia, where the information may not be legitimate. I would use SweetSearch for my Action Research project by linking it to my site, so then my students will know and understand that this is the site that I would like for them to start their research at.
This site is not a new idea, as there are other search engines that block or limit content, but SweetSearch is able to find the most relevant results from a list of credible resources. It also makes it easier for students to find primary sources, such as pictures, letters, and other historical items.
Sweet Search sounds sweet! I like the idea of a filtered search engine. I would hate to have my students go home and do research at home and possibly bring up the wrong kind of sites. inappropriate sites can easily come up in a search engine. for example if a student was doing research on beavers, and google searched "beavers," they might not get the site they were looking for. Sweet Search would eliminate the sites that have inappropriate content so that students can search freely.
ReplyDeleteI really like the idea of this. While I don't have any young, impressionable children that I am teaching, or of my own, I will recommend this site to all the parents that I know with little ones. Its such a good idea, and the kids don't even need to know that their media is being censored. Thanks for sharing!
ReplyDeleteI knew there were search engines like this available and now a have information on an exact one. When I taught middle school, searching for information could be dangerous. Something as simple as searching "dragons" brought up sites of dragon tattoos on parts of bodies we needn't see at school. Somehow it got through the school filters.
ReplyDeleteI teach high school now so I am not as squeamish about searches but I plan on passing this information to my friends still teaching at middle schools or with impressionable kids at home.
This is a really great tool that you highlighted this week. I liked that you can set the search engine to work for you. As a science teacher, it would be an awesome tool so that my students could see what was new in science on an almost daily period. Thanks for posting this. I plan to look into this and of course make sure this a site that my district allows us to use.
ReplyDelete