Search Engines

There are thousands of search engines on the web, the most notable being Google, Bing and Yahoo. An important job of a teacher is to sort out the useful search engines from the bad ones. Some search engines do not find good, academic material for students to work with. As a teacher, you don't want your students wasting precious class time sifting through thousands of unrelated sites. One way to prevent this is to give students engines that relate to what they're looking for. If they are looking for pictures relating to a historical event, find a search engine that finds pictures off the web. Same for videos; there are many engines that search solely videos. There are also subject specific search engines such as historybuff.com and chemindustry.com. I am a Google fan but this is primarily because I was never taught to use anything else. By the time I was well versed in searching and researching, I was loyal to Google. When Bing came out, I was skeptical and hadn't even checked it out. However, I think by limiting myself to one search engine I have limited my options and resources. When I have my own students, I don't want limit their knowledge and the tools that they work with but instead I want to open them up to unlimited possibilities. I think a big lesson that students from their teachers is how to use these many search engines effectively so that they find the material they need and do not become overwhelmed.

In addition, educators can create their own custom search engine in relation to whatever subject matter the class is covering at the time. Google provides a free account where teachers can add websites they deem useful and decide whether or not they think students should be able to access other websites or not. I created an account and added a dozen websites in less than 5 minutes. This could save teachers a lot of trouble trying to help herd their students in the right direction when it comes to research. This way, students will have a fenced in area to work with while still perusing several websites for the information they want and need.