instructional technology network
tri-county educational service center

www.free.ed.gov

There is a wealth on information available on the websites for government agencies. However, given that there are so many of them (agencies, that is), hunting down good stuff can be hard to do, especially for students who have less experience with search skills, or even a limited ability to scan through materials.

This site brings the resources of well over 60 different organizations together in one place. As described on the site’s “About FREE” page:

“FREE makes it easier to find teaching and learning resources from the federal government.

“More than 1,500 federally supported teaching and learning resources are included from dozens of federal agencies. New sites are added regularly.

“FREE is among the most popular K-12 websites maintained by the U.S. Department of Education because of the many great resources being offered by participating federal agencies.”

The major subject groupings include:

• Arts & Music
• Health & Phys Ed
• Language Arts
• Math
• Science
• World Studies
• U.S. History, including
  • Business & Work
  • Ethnic Groups
  • Famous People
  • Government
  • Movements
  • States and Regions
  • Wars
  • Other History & Social Studies
• U.S. Time Periods

Receive free.ed.gov resource updates via their RSS feed at: http://www.ed.gov/free/free-rss.xml

If you could customize the search results for your class searches would you do it? How would you tweak the results? Would you select a list of sites to search? Specify sites that should get preferred listing? A list of sites to leave out of the search?

Google’s Custom Search allows such customization. With Custom Search you can make a number of modifications to the search process you direct your students to use. Educational users may also opt out of displaying Google Ads on their results page.

This is a great opportunity to pare down search results for specific projects or younger researchers just learning their way around mainstream search tools. I am not suggesting the use of Google Custom Search in lieu of teaching students to use the real-world web, but rather as a chance to make searches better for specific situations.

The example here will search all of the ESC’s pages, even though we have content hosted on at least three servers at two different locations.

(As of publication time, Google still isn’t indexing new content on the ESC website very well, so the results aren’t likely to be complete or current. This is not problem with the Custom Search tool itself.)

The URL for your custom site is less than pretty, so I would recommend linking to it from your classroom website (or Progress Book).

For a more detailed explanations see the Google Custom Search site or see Read/Write Web’s writeup, Google Custom Search: Setting the Bar for Vertical Search Engines. Thanks to Jim Vincent at SPARCC for passing along a heads-up on the education application of this tool.

INFOhio recently announced the release of the new INFOsearch tool.

INFOsearch allows the user to search many of INFOhio’s resources simultaneously. This resource will make it quicker and easier to locate good content via INFOhio. Records can be targeted toward the usual K-5 /6-8 /9-12 groups and can be filtered by resource types.

Tip: This would be a good place to introduce students to search skills using multiple databases.

More information:

• Full Press release from Theresa Frederick, Executive Director of INFOhio
• INFOsearch Frequently Asked Questions