Google offers the opportunity to create a custom search service and I knew this, but I had never considered potential educational applications until I heard Alan November present some ideas at NECC.
You can set up a search engine and control the web sites it will access (you can probably get the idea from the screen capture I have inserted above. You need a Google account to gain access and then locate the option under the list of Google Products (I can’t offer a link here because the link would not work unless you have a Google account). So, this was not new to me.
What I did not consider was that you can also control who can add sites to search and who can view and how setting these preferences might be of some educational value. Assume a tech coordinator sets up a search engine focused on useful web sites for elementary science and offers elementary teachers within the district the opportunity to contribute URLs. Perhaps the goal is to explore the wildlife of the state. Access to this collection could be made public or shared more privately. What might be made available to students as a consequence of this process might be a Google search engine that would then only return search results appropriate to the topic (level, focus, quality, etc..).
What follows is a custom search engine that will return hits from my two blogs. You can test it be first locating something in this blog and then conducting a search to see if you locate the post you expect (and perhaps others).
