SearchyPants: Customisable Searches for Kids

I am always keen to find customised search engines for learners and SearchyPants is my latest find.

Searchy Pants allows children, parents & schools to create a custom search home page for their child to use and allows families to easily communicate by leaving custom messages. Schools can also use Searchy pants to showcase pupils work while providing a safe search experience.

-SearchyPants 'About' page 

Since introducing SweetSearch and Instagrok, my learners have been surprisingly vocal about how useful they found them so I will definitely be adding this to their toolbox.

Instagrok: A 'Wow!' Search Engine for Education

There are a lot of organisations releasing ways to interrogate the web, but Instagrok is an immediate game-changer in the educational search-engine world. Not only does it generate multimedia results on one page - including the usual videos and images, but also the less usual key facts, quizzes and related concepts - but you can also use the on-screen slider to adjust the difficulty level of the results displayed. This means you can access the basic to the erudite without having to do anything more than dragging your mouse.

Among the other useful features is the ability to register and add findings to your Instagrok journal which you can supplement with other information. Teachers can create accounts for their classes to track what is being researched and pinned: great for monitoring to determine where support is needed.

For a full overview of features, take a look at Instagrok's PDF brochure or watch the video below:

Integration:

This, along with Sweetsearch and Kidrex, offers a guided route through the web to school learners making research a whole lot simpler and more likely to yield useful results.