tech.life@school | Enhancing children's searches on the Web

Searching is a developmental skill. Younger children need more guidance, more selection and fewer choices than adults do. They need search tools that will lead them to documents that match their interests, curricula and reading abilities.

Because Google does not cut it in this arena, parents and teachers can make a dramatic difference by creating simple search tool pages, files of bookmarks, or Word documents available on the desktop with handy links and passwords.

Student search tools fit roughly into three categories. You will find subject directories, search engines and subscription services. In this column, we will examine children's subject directories. We'll examine the others in my next column.

Subject directories do not crawl the Web using electronic robots or spiders. Instead, human editors review and select sites, organizing the selected documents into logical subject structures.

KidsClick, at www.kidsclick.org, designed to lead children to "valuable and age-appropriate Web sites," is maintained by the Colorado State Library. Carefully selected entries are assigned subject headings, annotated, and identified with tags for reading level and number of illustrations. KidsClick does not accept advertising. It also avoids commercial sites, sites in obvious violation of copyright laws, and sites with unsafe privacy policies. The subject hierarchy creates a logical structure for student browsers.

Designed for both learning and "edutainment," Ask Jeeves for Kids, at www. ajkids.com, is a question-answering directory that includes a nice stack of reference resources. When answers to specific questions are not found, AJ Kids defaults to a metasearch, searching across selected search tools aimed at young people. Ask Jeeves checks spelling and allows students to ask questions in natural language. For example: Who is the president of Argentina? But Ask Jeeves does not always answer students' deeper questions, those reaching beyond facts. (And remember to turn off frames so students see the actual source of the document.)

Yahooligans, at www.yahooligans. com/, selects and categorizes sites in a useful browsing structure. Though Yahooligans offers wonderful directories, young users may be distracted by the heavy entertainment content - games, jokes, popular culture and ubiquitous advertising. The Big Picture, the Yahooligans news area, introduces international and national stories.

Multnomah County Library Homework Center, at www.multcolib.org/homework/, is an Internet subject directory designed to address the needs of K-12 curriculum. Resources are reviewed and selected by the library's reference staff. Though focused on the homework needs of its own Oregon community, the well-organized, annotated homework help has universal application.

Awesome Library for Kids, at www.awesomelibrary.org/student.html, arranged by major school subject areas, is searchable in several languages. Resources are carefully evaluated for quality. Exceptional resources are assigned yellow stars. The new Awesome Talkster uses text-to-voice technology to make the Web more accessible to people with visual or physical impairments and younger readers.

At http://highschoolhub.org/hub/hub.cfm, High School Hub offers free online learning materials for high school students, gathering quizzes, lessons and reviews.

At http://homeworkspot.com/, Homework Spot is a reference center and homework portal divided by curricular area and arranged in grade-appropriate categories for elementary, middle and high school.

FirstGov for Kids, at www.kids.gov/, is the U.S. government's interagency children's portal, gathering the substantial number of federal children's sites in a subject group arrangement, with such popular categories as plants and animals, health, space, and careers.

For an example of a children's search page, visit http://mciu.org/~spjvweb/kidsearch.html.