Thing 10: Search Tools Ninja

I spent some time exploring KidRex and Choosito since I work with younger students. I was excited about the option to select reading levels in Choosito, unfortunately since that feature is part of the paid portion, I was unable to see the feature in action. I think if my school purchased this search tool it would be a resource I direct my students to use, but with other options available, it is not something I would personally pay for. I wanted to love KidRex, but found that although the search results were "safe", they were not necessarily relevant to what I was searching for. I searched: cookies, zebra, monkey...each search resulted in a lot of ads and results that would not provide my students with the information they were looking for. (Of course I would need to teach my students about which sites are most reliable and using key words, but as third graders, I think the search results were just too vast.) I looked into the site a bit more and it looked like KidRex was working on a "Pro" version that might better filter results. If so, that may be something to check out in the future, but for now, KidRex is not a tool I plan to use in the classroom.

SweetSearch - I typed in the same three topics into SweetSearch, and although the first few hits were ads, I found that just a few results down were more relevant sites such as National Geographic. I looked into their news version and found that there were many ads within the articles themselves that weren't necessarily things students needed to be distracted by when researching information. My school subscribes to PebbleGo, which may be the more appropriate option for my younger students.