Elementary Math, Ancient Greece-6th Grade, Biomes-6th Grade, and Ancient China-6th Grade

These are groups of websites I’ve put together. When you go to any of the above web pages, you get a Google Search Engine that will use all of Google’s power to search ONLY THOSE SITES!

The advantage of using this is that you can use keyword searches to search several websites at once. Many websites have a database (aka: a search box where you can put in your search terms) that allow you to search their site very easily. One of the best sites, which has one of the cleanest interfaces of all the math sites I’ve seen is the National Library of Virtual Manipulatives. But it doesn’t have everything you might want if you’re searching for a good website to use to help you teach math. There are other sites that have a database of their own. The Google Custom Search Engine tool allows you to search all of them at once! It will even include, of course, web sites that don’t have a search box of their own.

I’m excited about this because I can send my students to these search pages and actually teach the concept and skill of performing good keyword searches, rather than sending them to just a list of links to try out, one by one. In the case of the Elementary Math Custom Search, I’m intending to allow other educators to search all of these sites at once.

Another very powerful feature of this tool is that sites can be contributed by up to 100 people!!! I invite anyone reading this who finds a great math website that you think should be part of this group of sites in this Custom Search, please send it to me. I can officially invite you through the Google page where I created the Custom Search, too..

Now, how is this different from http://del.icio.us/ ? This is another tool that I have also jumped into in a big way. I’ve been using my account consistently for quite a while now: http://del.icio.us/wark. I’ve also put a lot of math-specific sites together at this account: http://del.icio.us/math34

With Delicious, you can:

• Tag sites with categories you make up, that might or might not be words that show up when Google searches their titles, URLs, or text of the pages
• Give a quick notation to the sites you’re making public
• Put sites into categories (by the tags you make) for someone who doesn’t know what they’re looking for (and thus wouldn’t know what search terms to enter)
• Search your own (delicious) bookmarks, or all the bookmarks of all delicious users. Because of this feature, I initially thought that these two tools might not be all that different. At first, I thought…so why do this, if I can search delicious, too?

With Google Custom Search, you can

• Unleash Google’s powerful search algorithms to search through all of the sites you include
• Invite others to contribute
• Send people to your Google Custom Search in lots of ways. One is with simple links, as in the links above. Here’s another, like I’ve done with my class website. You can search right from your own website!

At the “World Café” event put on by CTAP 7 the other night, Alan November showed us a tool that has me thinking. It’s the ability to set up your own search engine…sort of. It’s called Google Custom Search Engine.

You choose the sites that should be in the bank of websites that it will search. Others can collaborate in assembling those sites. People can go to your search page, put in whatever search terms they want, and it will use the Google search algorithms to search within those pages.

How does a teacher decide which to use? You’d have to really be clear about:

• who would be using your tool (delicious page or Google Custom Search)
• what the purpose would be
• and other factors

I’ll have to get my hands dirty with Google Custom Search, and do a more thorough analysis on the idea of which tool would be best for which situation…