Why Do They Do it?

In my last post, I gushed about instagrok. And ARRRRGGGGGHHHH!  It's blocked by Lightspeed!  Lightspeed is the BCPS filter.  The reason it was blocked was listed as blogs.  So I emailed the Webfilter team and noted that this was a search engine not a blog.  I soon received a reply which said they had asked for a re-evaluation by Lightspeed and it came back as nudity. 

I was incredulous!  Wait a minute!  This is advertised as an educational tool.  How can there be nudity?  They must have made a mistake!  So I questioned again and this time they came back and said search for nudity.  Sure enough there it was!

Holy Hannah!  Are they that out of touch?   Why would you promote something as educational and then allow controversial stuff to creep into your algorithims!  I'm certainly not an advocate of censorship, but I work in a high school and watching teenage boys standing around a computer monitor snickering is the dead give-away.   If its way too easy to get to inappropriate stuff as it was on this one, it should not be designed for educational use.  Our kids are smarter than us in the area of technology and they can find it when it's buried deep.

I know this is still an evolving medium, but what a waste of a great product!

I read several blogs on a daily basis and I definitely have some very favorite ones.  Richard Byrne's Free Technology for Teachers is one of my all-time favorites as is Joyce Valenza's Never Ending Search.  Both of these are prolific bloggers with great stuff to share.  I don't normally repost their stuff.  Instead I try to find some things that they haven't mentioned (actually kind of hard to do!)

But Joyce recently posted about an educational search engine that is fabulous.  I only hope it continues to expand.  I plan on using it with a class today!  It's called InstaGrok.  When you search, your results are returned in a wonderfully organized way which is so appropriate in education.  Not only that, but the results are rich in media, encourage students to ask questions and include visual image maps, videos, websites, questions and even quizzes.

The demo video gives a great overview, but it's much better when you try it yourself!  The video is a little out of date.  They have an updated version on their website.

The use of the concept map on the first page of the results is a recent improvement and allows students to see the inter-relationshop between their search and related topics.

This looks to be a great tool for students.  Stay tuned to find out how my students liked it!