Research Tools

I have been sharing research tools with teachers throughout the district the past few weeks. I decided to put the tools here for everyone. There are countless research tools available to teachers and students today. Share these with your students or give them a try yourself.

Advanced Google Search
Most students and teachers use Google as their primary search engine. Google search is a very comprehensive tool but many times when you search you get way more results than you can sift through and they are not all valuable in an educational setting. By using Advanced Google Search you can narrow your searches and make it easier to find exactly what you are looking for.
Advanced Google Search Tutorial


Sweet Search
Another way to find better quality results from your search is Sweet Search. This search engine returns only educationally approved results. They have a research team that evaluates sources and approves the quality ones. There are other tools available on the site for students and teachers and you can get daily resources for Elementary, Middle and High School.

Mashpedia
Students love this search engine! Mashpedia returns results from several different sources for each search. For example if you search for "gulf oil spill" you will receive results from wikipedia, youtube, twitter, news sources, google book sources, and google images. This saves students time looking at all these different sources by bringing it to them in one search.

Eyeplorer
Eyeplorer is another visual search engine that provides results in text format or in a web format. The web format is a visual display of your search topic that provides related search topics within the web. This makes it easier than a simple Google search because when you search for a term or concept you will also see related terms or concepts making for a more detailed and simplified search.

Oamos
WOW! You have to take a look at this one. This is an amazing multimedia search tool. It provides results in a very visual format. It is a little overwhelming for someone not of the net generation, in my opinion, but I can see how digital natives would enjoy this tool. You can select, using a slider tool, if you want results that are more objective or more entertaining. WOW!

Kngine
Self professed "search engine designed to provide meaningful search results" tool that returns only objective results for any term/concept searched. It seems to cut out useless information and organizes the objective information so users can access news, images, videos and other results.

Here are a few other tools recommended by Tech & Learning that I have not used.
Quintura, Spezify, Scoopler, Webkruz, Sputtik, Feedmil.