With the Fourth Grade ready to do research on their Science Fair topics, and Third Graders researching famous Americans, we had The Discussion: “How do we make this safe for our students?”
- We have our own Library Search engines, and that helps immensely.
- If the kids want to use Google, we require them to put a space then “k12″ after what they’re searching for (For example, “How bananas ripen k12″). This makes school websites percolate to the top of the search results.
- We also talked about Google defaulting to http://4me.sweetsearch.com/ because every Web site in SweetSearch has been evaluated by dedicated research experts.
Our goals are safe curiosity, preventing kids from becoming overwhelmed or misdirected, and keeping that joy of independent learning going straight ahead!