Reengineering the search engines...a must in the era of overwhelming information

It is completely overwhelming to be immersed in the technological world and deal with the astoundingly growing amount of information that is available nowadays. As a heavy information user, I find myself swimming in this sea of data (text, images, videos, blog posts, podcasts,etc), and most of the time I spend while searching the resources I want to incliude in my classses is filtering among the search results from the different seach engines I use according to the nature of queries.
I have come up to summariza search engines depending on their specialty. Even though using multiple and specialized search engines is a great help, it has always been an incomplete experience.
I just enjoyed what is the new experience of search engines mixed up with a spreadsheet feeling of information classification.

Google Squared is one of the new services Google is offering for those of us who enjoy browsing through the vast oceans of information.
It gives you a new dynamic process when searching ands classifying your information. It certainly reduces your searching time and extends your options. You can add criteria by adding columns to enrich your search results.
I encourage you to incorporate it into your searching experience. Take a look at the following video:




Here are some of the search engines I use and recommend:

METASEARCH Engines:
www.mamma.com
www.dogpile.com
www.ixquick.com
www.webcrawler.com
www.izito.com
www.faganfinder.com

IMAGE Search Engines:
www.compfight.com
www.taggalaxy.com (Great to be used with an interactive whiteboard)
www.tineye.com
http://elzr.com/imagery
www.pixsy.com

OTHER Search Engines:
www.soople.com (Easy expert search)
http://4me.sweetsearch.com/ (Sweet search 4 me)
www.ipl.org (Libraries' search engine)
www.rollyo.com (Customizable search engine)
www.blackle.com (Energy-saver search engine powered by Google)
www.2lingual.com (Bilingual Search engine)

I hope these search engines are of good use for you as a teacher or internet user.
If you have additional search engines, please contribute and post a comment.

This is an addition to the organization search engines can give you. I want to include Google Wonderwheel. It is a very graphic way to organize the information you're searching. I recommend you the post from Alan Simpson's blog, One year in the life of an English teacher. Here one of the images he used:

Global Communication

Several months ago I recieved an email from somebody, the message included a link to a geek test. I took it, out of curiosity. It turns out I didn’t qualify as a real geek, even though I spend several hours a day in front of a computer. But I guess being a computer geek is more a lifestyle that a job description. Although if we watch the british sitcom The IT Crowd, everything mingles into a crazy success on unreal events and situations, funny for sure.

I mention this because I get many comments from people expressing their concern for how “youth is becoming less and less communicative and deepened in computers”. Nothing could be farther from the truth. I can accept that over the last decades most people tend to work out less or even walk, but less communicative, I don’t think that is true.

I can say this because it seems to me that lots of people are very reluctant to big changes, and considering the fact that global changes can happen in a matter of minutes via YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, and many more internet resources.

Since I started working very actively in my school’s ICT Area, I have met lots of people online. Ok, I know, that’s one of the major criticisms and jokes from people with over 10,000 friends in Facebook; but the important part of this is that getting to know my professional contacts online has allowed to meet some of them personally, even though I’m on the opposite side of the continent, bringing new possibilities of collaborative projects, exchange of learning experiences and sharing culturally-competent activities.

My contacts, besides family and friends, are almost all professional contacts. These people help me get information, process it and discuss it so I’m able to learn many new things.

Anyway, I’m glad that distances, are virtual, and virtually tiny, because VOIP, video conferences and else, help us reduce distances, time and costs. Important ingredients in any professional stting or business area.

How could I teach my students about technological impact on education if I am not a clear example that learning through global connections is not possible, but necessary nowadays.

Let’s take a look at an interesting journey to technological possibilities in the future, the merchantilistic view is impressive, although hollow.

Lecturing - November 30th

Last week I went to Rio de Janeiro to give two lectures about Wikis and its uses in Primary and Secondary Education. I went to share my experience during this year. Until february this year, I had never worked in blogs, wikis or anything beyond MSN Messenger and basic internet search engines.

But it took only a few weeks of basic training, institutional support and self-learning to become the ICT Coordinator at my school.

Going to Rio helped me realize that even though I have the possibility to communicate with anybody in the world in real-time through Plurk, Twitter, or receive the information in a matter of minutes after it was published in any part of the world through bloglines; not everybody does it.

Part because their technological immersion is still in the rise, or because the need to do it has not reached them yet. It reached me quickly, and even though I will never stop learning I feel happy to be part of the educational technology world team, because the distances in a global community are reduces with one or two clicks.

Wiki, Week, and Weak - October 15th

"Men are from Mars and Women are from venus" or so said John Gray when published his book in 1992. Cliché phrases are everywhere in our daily lives. I actually found a website that helps you find clichés. Technology doesn't escape from clichés. Female presence in the ICt area is not as high as the male one, yet. I think that proportion will reverse soon. My experience with Wikis is reduced to a few jonths only. I work producing weekly edits in my class wikis, even though I was as weak as any IT ignorant until I discovered the benefit of being "connected". you're in the loop as long as you participate in the world. The World Wide Web has opened new possibilities in the communication area. I read dozens of updates in my twitter network. I follow a lot of people in the same area. I benefit from them. I use all that expertise as an empowerment. ICT empowers my mind, it challenges my perception of things and keeps me very busy, that's for sure.

It helps me discover that there is a whole world of possibilities on a nanosecond base, and if you are out of the loop you'll be delayed in your professional development. Will that be my weakness if I stop checking information on a weekend? I saw a great video the other day, shifthappens, check it out. Information generated daily is doubling on astronomical figures and in shorter time than just a few decades before. I'll try to keep up-to-date!

ICT in Education - August 27th, 2008

I've mentioned before that the education is constantly evolving, but for the last few years the incorporation of the Information and Communication Technologies, or ICTs is an unstoppable tendency. Our school is constantly working trying to implement the use of technology as a complementary tool within the teaching methodology. The use of the Web 2.0 tools is becoming a must in our classes. And for those of us who appreciate the use of technology instead of banning it within the classrooom is always useful to find and implement the direct use and impact of these tools in our lessons preparation.

Today's teacher is constantly looking for new and innovative ways to present information in a way that the primary beneficiary has to be the student. Nowadays the information is not reserved, on the contrary it is available for anybody, at any time and from anywehere.

Tools are always useful, that's why I share this nice presentation found recently in the web giving us a great deal of websites and tools.

101 Free Learning Tools

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: teaching thinking)