#3 Web search engines: What do you know about them? How important are they in the classroom?

There were 4 important pieces of information that were helpful this week for me:

1. Meta search engines. While I had heard of Dogpile, I did not quite know what they did. I find it useful now to also check with metasearch engines.

2. Visual Search engines. Visual search engines were also a new concept to me with tremendous potential. This is a useful tool for those who are visual learners and perhaps some with learning disabilities.

3. Educational listservs. While I have subscribed to a few, this particular piece of information provided a way for me to search for others that I was not aware of.

4. Kid friendly search engines. On a personal note, I appreciated this information. I have noted Yahooligans and Kidsclik.

I learned about Google Scholar for the first time and found it tremendously useful for educational information. When searching for topics on education, I found that I had to be creative and use other terms such as virtual libraries, classrooms, etc. I used metasearch engines to explore the topics initially but it did not return as many helpful websites as looking at specific websites.

Using the correct search engine and phrases will help yield accurate results and less frustration.