Getting ready for....

cross-posted at TechLearning.com

This past week while preparing for a trip to Quebec City I used several tools to check out our options for travel. I imagine that my students could use these same tools to discover a place of their choice to investigate as a possible place of travel or interest.

A great place to begin for young children K-5 is with Quintura. It is an online visual search engine which gave me the following options in a cloud when I entered Quebec City: tourism, visit, around the world, province, Canada, Quebec, area. I then selected tourism and was prompted to the Official Tourism site and found something for our first evening, Les Grands Feux Loto-Québec - Pyrotechnic Competition .

A search for all kinds and all ages Google Wonder Wheel. You can find the Wonder Wheel when you click on the more options at a Google Search. I popped in Quebec City and a wheel of choices popped up with options for photos, hotels, restaurants and once drilling down from there I found L’Astral, the revolving restaurant on top of Quebec City.

Safe Search, powered by Google, is another good search for the K-5 age group. A search of Quebec City brought up a list without images with Wikipedia at the top of the list, which could start up the conversation about open source and the work of the crowd creating information through Wikipedia.

Finally, Sweet Search , where every site recommended has been reviewed by the Sweet Search team! This is a web search engine for emerging researchers, our students. This search brought up some great travel guides and then on the side of the page, some tidbits of the day, and the one that caught my eye was, how Hiram Bingham Discovers Lost Inca City of Machu Picchu.

I hope  readers find something new in this list of researching tools that you can try out personally while you are on break and then bring this back to your classroom for your students. Anytime we can experience these tools, we are better able to share a ‘search’ experience with our students. For those of you in the southern hemisphere who are already back to school, please share any new search engines you are using. Pick something and have a great search today.