~ Response Blog 1~~~ My Opinions and Reflections~~~

The issue I faced with relating to Chapter 2, The Empowered Researcher, is that the students I teach/taught would not be searching on the Internet at any point during my instruction time.  Most of my former students were lucky to be able to label the letters in their first name by age 5, so truncating a URL is a little extreme for them.  However, this is an issue I've faced often in grad school and at company trainings as research in my general field is minimal.  Maybe not research in preschool alone, or special education alone, but in "preschool special education" the amount of research and presentations are skimpy.  So I've gotten used to adapting the information for my use and have passed along tons of great ideas to coworkers and friends that work with older students.

The kid friendly search engines mentioned in the text are certainly something to keep in my back pocket for use by my relatives and coworkers.  I did decide, however, that it might be helpful if some of the kids search engines/websites "spoke" to searchers more.  If my students were to roll over an icon, it would be great if that icon gave them ideas of what they could play with or learn from on a given page with an actual voice output.  I can't imagine the time and effort it would take a web designer to set something like that up, but I bet a pro would say the idea isn't totally off the wall or unachievable.  I guess a lot of that is reserved for games that children and families would pay to use on their computers?

For example, this Fisher Price website has awesome games for students age infant to preschooler.  But, on the page where the student would choose the game, there is no auditory description of what they could choose.  Students would just be choosing games based on the picture icon and not the content.  When you get into a game, like this one about opposites, the directions, prompts, and praise are accompanied by sound.  That's an outstanding option for a non-reader or a beginning reader.

I know this feedback might sound very case specific, but if you think about it, a lot of students are unable to read until first grade.  Even some second graders may be able to read well, but might not be totally confident with their abilities to do so on an unfamiliar site loaded with text (and blinking, moving ads in the margins, headers, and footers). 

Finally, a lot of the kid friendly search engines weren't as forgiving with misspellings as good old Google.  When I typed in "tomas tha tnk" (a pretend phonetic spelling of Thomas the Tank) on CyberSleuth Kids and Kids Click, no search results were found.  I did have luck with AOL Kids and traditional Google.  However, Google was the only site to automatically give me Thomas the Tank findings, without having to click on another hyperlink labeled Thomas the Tank.

Here are just some random other reflections/questions that I wrote down while reading.  This part isn't very well formed, but I still wanted to throw it out to you all:

I did find it interesting that the tilde (~) symbol meant that a site was based on opinion.  So that's something I'll definitely take with me in future research and Web surfs.  It is curious that Blog URLs don't have tildes embedded in their text, but perhaps it's just to be assumed that content in Blogs is most often opinion based. 

One thing I did wonder while reading was is .us follows as TLD extension when you search United States site in Europe or South America, for example?  I never even thought to ask about that until going through the reading.

It's really wild that companies and groups can purchase words for web searches for their benefit.  It reminded me a lot of pharmaceutical companies funding disease research so that their drugs will seem more useful or necessary.  It really makes you wonder how easy it is to get solid, valid, straight, fact based answers about personal questions.