Searching for Science

This week I was looking at different search engines for kids to use. Since my school is a one to one campus, our kids always have access to the internet. Some of you may think that is a bad thing, but it's really about teaching them to be responsible on the internet. I looked at several kid-friendly search engines: Kidrex, Wonderopolous, Slime Kids, Kidtopia, and Infotopia. I noticed that many of these search engines don't give a video option like Google does. I tried to look for one more geared towards science but to no avail. It got me thinking about an activity we were doing in a fifth-grade class about force and motion and the scenario talked about a catapult. So, I thought how fun would it be to find a short video showing a pumpkin catapult contest! These search engines that I mentioned above brought up different science experiments and articles to read about catapults. However, I wanted them to see an image or a short video. I ended up really liking Kiddle, which is the kid-friendly version of Google basically. I really liked it because you can select images or videos and this is ideal for science! This gives us opportunities to take students on virtual field trips and this is the perfect search engine for it!