One of my coworkers told me about this lovely little (big?) search engine.
We've all been there when we get our students to do some kind of research and they type whatever it is they are looking up into Google only to be able to read 1 thing in the top 10 searches.
WELL NOT ANYMORE
KidRex is a search engine that is designed for kids.
Now, I'll admit the main page is a little childish, I'm not sure what my students will think of it when I tell them to do their searches on there next time we have to do some research (we haven't used it yet).
BUT, according to my coworker the articles on there are at a lower grade level so that most of your students will hopefully be able to read more of the articles that pop up (my coworker who has tried it teaches grade 3).
So I did a little comparison using the word "mucus" (forgive me but we are studying the human body)
Here is a side by side comparison
What I noticed:
1) My students will be attracted to the pictures that accompany nearly every link
2) There are still "advertisements" (the Hyland's and Similasan are things you can buy - likely not telling us much about mucus)
3) There is no image search (and I'm not sure about you but I find that no matter what image my students search for there is ALWAYS something inappropriate that comes through AND they always scroll through the search for forever so that they stumble across it)
4) I clicked on the Britannica link to see how the wording was... it was still kind of wordy for what my grade 5 and 6 class would be able to read BUT it was short.
5) Wikipedia didn't come up in the first page of searches.
6) There were only 8 links on the first page... Google had quite a bit more links.
7) The writing is larger
8) There is also far less writing in KidRex
Want to try KidRex out?
You can find it at:
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