Sweet Search - A Search Engine for Students
From
Sweet Search : This "is a search engine that searches only the sites that have been reviewed and approved by a team of librarians, teachers, and research experts. In all there are 35,000 websites that have been reviewed and approved by Sweet Search. "Sweet Search can be used by visiting the site directly or you can embed Sweet Search widgets into your blog or website. I took a look at the librarian selected sites which were excellent. I like the idea of embedding their widgets easily into our Libguides. This sounds great!
But wait a minute,I can't help but feel that there is essentially a big "shortcut" here that could leave long negative long-terms consequences for teaching search strategies. If we exclusively use these type of tools when are we able to introduce concepts of critical thinking and web site evaluation?
Professor Howard Rheingold has developed a wiki called Critical Thinking Compendium where there are already dozens of resources linked.
Join this wiki to browse resources and contribute some of your own. Here's a sampling:
Here is Howard Rheingold's Diigo feed for the tag "critical thinking"
Hrheingold's Favorite Links on critical_thinking from Diigo
- Critical Thinking
- EduDemic » A Fascinating Night With Howard Rheingold & 117 Critical Thinkers
- Critical thinking In the classroom
- YouTube - Critical Thinking: A Reasoning Experience
- YouTube - Critical Thinking and the Basic Elements of Thought
- This Side of the Pond | News Talk: How To Be A Language Savvy News Consumer
- Critical Thinking On The Web
- Argument Mapping
- Half an Hour: An Operating System for the Mind
- Intute - Training - Encouraging Critical Thinking Online
Here is Howard Rheingold's Diigo feed for the tag "crap detection"
Hrheingold's Favorite Links on crap_detection from Diigo
- Website Credibility Determined by the Search Route » Spotlight
- Open Thinking Wiki
- EduDemic » A Fascinating Night With Howard Rheingold & 117 Critical Thinkers
- US record labels starts fake "citizen's group" to support Canada's DMCA - Boing Boing
- This Side of the Pond | News Talk: How To Be A Language Savvy News Consumer
- Gulf oil spill: To control message, BP buys search terms from Google - CSMonitor.com
- Twitter Journalism » Vetting Twitter Sources
- When science clashes with beliefs? Make science impotent
- On Wikipedia: Dr. Handel or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Wikipedia
- Ideas Project
1 comment:
Hello Judy, thank you for this kind review of Sweet Search, which my company created. When you and I were in high school, we did our research in the school library, where we were pointed to all the credible resources on a topic and asked to decide which ones were relevant to our particular research. This is what Sweet Search does for students on the Internet. Students still must review a list of links, but they can focus which sources are the best from a list of good sources. With general search engines, students usually evaluate the first 5-10 links only to learn that many of them are not usable, which causes frustration and often leads them to focusing on the first two links. That's a good occasional exercise, just like an athlete may train by running burdened with a weight vest on to stress him and cause him to build extra muscle. To take your point to its extreme, will students learn best when they use a really bad search engine? When it's game time, students should, like athletes, use the best tools available to help them succeed. Here is my blog post explaining why I think SweetSearch is the best search engine for student use. http://blog.findingdulcinea.com/2010/02/why-sweetsearch-is-the-best-search-engine-for-students.html
Incidentally, we've also created an outstanding Web search tutorial, which we will update from time to time and create lesson plans and videos for; it can be found at www.SweetSearch.com/TenSteps
Additionally, we've created a version of SweetSearch that prominently features great sites for young learners; see it at www.SweetSearch4Me.com
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