I have a new crowd-sourcing idea up my sleeve that needs your help and input. It is all based around the idea of a collaborative search engine that can be constructed together – Shared Search.
Elevator Pitch
- A community of educators work together on a Google custom search engine (CSE).
- The CSE can be for any specific topic taught in the classroom.
- A new CSE is created and collaborators are invited (like Google Docs) to add suitable sites.
- Labels are added to the sites to filter their relevance, this can be used in the search results too – which means it can be relevant to different age groups.
- Up to 100 collaborators can be invited to any one CSE.
- The broader the pool of contributions the richer the search experience for the pupil.
- The code will be shared to educators who want to embed it in their schools sites and blogs.
- The community generate a growing library of relevant search engines for different curriculum topics.
So what do you think? Are you interested in helping with the first one. I have set up a search engine about SEALIFE, as this is a common topic and one that has a huge amount of content.
The idea of a Shared Search is that we act as first filter to the children’s own experience of searching online content.
If you have some underwater web gems to share please sign up in the form below and look out for the email invite into the Custom Search Engine. I look forward to seeing your response and I hope that we can once again help create something valuable together.
Why not try out the “SEALIFE” Shared Search below. Remember as more people contribute sites the more useful it will become.
How’s this project coming along? Over the years, I’ve encouraged folks in my training sessions to do exactly this, but as an independent trainer, I haven’t been able to follow through with them. Will share this blog post with some upcoming training groups. Hope some of them will pitch in and help out!
I created a custom search for my Homeeconomicshelper website http://www.teachnet.ie/homeeconomicshelper/. I included sites that my students would find useful. I like the idea of sharing this with others as we discover useful sites. I will change the settings and invite teachers to contribute,
Thank you for this idea.
Máire O’Hagan
Also I just remembered you can create your custom safe searches with a funky interface here:
http://searchypants.com/getyours.php
Have you checked out http://www.iseek.com? It is a search engine designed by and for educators containing authoritative resources only. It uses natural language understanding to find and organise results based on your query. It categorises the results by topic/grade level etc. It is free to use – give it a try. iSEEK has been placed in the top 100 companies that matter most in the digital content world, by eContent magazine and has won CODIE awards.
Maybe it’s also possible to use Google Social Search for this purpose: http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/01/search-is-getting-more-social.html
Thanks for the link John – seems you have a general search engine running there. I am going to crowd source multiple search engines for different topics.
Apparently great minds think alike! Thanks for sharing the Primary Technology search link.
Hi mate this already exists. See: http://primaryschoolict.com
http://www.google.com/cse/home?cx=000753778363423014722:xie0vouxf9m