Research Help

‍Alternatives to Google for More Specific Student Research:

• ‍Wolfram Alpha http://www.wolframalpha.com/

More like a huge encyclopedia than a search engine, Wolfram Alpha is a "Computational knowledge engine" that gives statistics, information, and demographics.

• ‍eThemes http://ethemes.missouri.edu/

eThemes is easy to search and has a good selection of targeted sites. Although students may not appreciate the State standards links to search, teachers will. Some of the sites brought up by eThemes are created by students, so it will be important for the teacher to explain that all information should be double checked. This site also informs the searcher when other sites have advertisements or discussion boards.

• ‍IPL2 (Internet Public Library and Librarians’ Internet Index) http://www.ipl.org/div/subject/index.html

This site contained many of the same sites linked from the eThemes site. And like eThemes, there is a good selection of targeted sites whether you use your own word or phrase to search or whether you use their categorized searchable sections. The site was organized well and not too distracting, which is good for student research.

• ‍Sweet Search 4 Me (for elementary students) http://4me.sweetsearch.com/

This site was a bit more challenging to search than eThemes or IPL2, as there were no searchable categories. This site also linked many teacher resource/lesson plan Web sites, in addition to kid-friendly Web sites. This site displays results from each Web page; with sentences underneath and boxes to the left of each sentence.

‍Free Web Safety Web Site:

• ‍Net Smartz

‍Teacher Lesson Plans and Resources:

• ‍Annenberg Media