I had no idea that there was so many different search engines out there… I looked at four different ones for today’s lesson. Bing, DuckDuckGo, Yahoo and Yandex. Since the students that I teach are four and five years old, they don’t spend a lot of time online researching information, I decided to search for something that I might use in class. I searched for “Canada & Olympics” on all four search engines, and to my surprise the results were very different!
Bing – This was the first search that I did, and I was impressed with the information that came up. It showed a chart of the medals (however, the only country that it showed was Canada). It included videos, articles and a variety of related sites.
DuckDuckGo – I thought this search engine was not very good. It was boring to look at, there was a lot of writing, and not ANY pictures. It had a lot of news articles on current information, however I found that it was just too much to filter through, and Google and Bing were better options so far…
Yahoo – This search engine was amazing! I am normally a Google person, but… after using Yahoo Search I felt that I may need to switch over. The information that I found was presented in videos, pictures and charts. There was a summary of the Canadian Olympic team, as well as the upcoming schedule of events. I thought that I would also do the same search on Google, to see what would come up. I was surprised that the Google results were not very visually appealing, and did not have the same information.
Yandex – This search engine did not seem to have very many pictures, articles and information that were relevant to my search. Upon further investigation I found that it was a Russian Search Engine…
I spent a lot of time today on Kathy Schrock’s website. It really made me think of how important it is that we teach our students to be critical thinkers not just about what they read online, but about all text that they will see, hear, read or watch. I enjoyed reading through some of the links that she has on her site, and thought that it may be helpful to share this information with the teachers at my school, so we can teach our students to be digital citizens. I enjoyed browsing through the different surveys, and thought that the Elementary Critical Evaluation Survey would be useful for the students at my school, and the iPad Content App and iPad Creation App could be utilized by the teachers when browsing though the thousands of apps available on the iPads.
Alexandra Hurford 