I began creating my custom search engine last night. After a couple of hours of researching web sites, I called it quits. I went back at it this afternoon and found some great web sites for my students. I followed all of the steps and even watched Andy's video for embedding the search into my website, but all I get is the page says it's loading. I will keep trying.
Pros and cons of using a CSE in the classroom:
There are definitely more pros than cons in this area. As a special education teacher, my students often spend hours researching the internet and have a hard time coming up with appropriate web sites. This takes away valuable class time. The CSE would allow me to direct my students to the most appropriate web sites. It would help my students to remain focused on the task rather than on the research.
Onto the cons. Students need to learn how effectively search the internet for information. By creating a CSE, this step is taken out. It can be a valuable learning experience. Creating the search engine is time consuming for the teacher.
Overall, I enjoyed creating the custom search engine and look forward to creating more for my students as the year progresses. I hope they become a valuable resource for myself and my students.
Here is the link to my CSE:
https://sites.google.com/site/customsearchengineburke/
I couldn't agree with you more about your pros and cons. I feel like it is a necessary process for students to go through all the stuff we go through when searching. Yet again, there is the possibility of them finding inappropriate sites and content. However, I can't imagine using this process as it takes so long to put together each on. When explaining to my husband all that I am learning about, I told him about the CSE. His response was, doesn't google do that for you already?
ReplyDeleteIt's always a battle between helping and "harming" so to speak. Making things too easy for our students vs. Making learning accessible. If you start them off with this one, you can later gradually release responsibility to have them research independently.
ReplyDeleteI completely get what your saying about taking away some of the work of filtering information from the students by creating the custom search. However, I think they still will have plenty to do in so far as looking for specific information within the sites you have chosen. I especially liked being able to choose sites that were more kid friendly, like National Geographic Kids, as the photographs were less graphic. Being a kindergarten teacher, that was really important to me. I'll save the photos of angry lions attacking a hippo from the front and behind for my 3rd graders...LOL.
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