By now anyone who reads my blog is no doubt aware that I am a strong advocate for the use of technology in education. I also value the potential of all the free Web 2.0 applications that are available if we choose to open our filters and our minds. Still, I am very aware that we need to help our students understand the impact that their computer input may have on their future. And, for that matter we need to be aware of our own digital footprint.

After watching the marvelous BBC film series Virtual Revolution – Cost of Free, I was compelled to further think about my own computer use and that of our students. Thus, the following poster. I have embedded the video series (found on YouTube) below my Sunday poster for your convenience. The hour you spend watching the series is truly worthwhile. Feel free to share your thoughts about the “Cost of Free” and the following poster with your students. You can share your thoughts using the comment link found at the bottom of this post as well.

The images used to create this poster were posted to Flickr by Nik McPhee and William Brawley. Click on this mini poster if you would like to view a larger version for printing. Click on the title of this blog if you would like to email this post to a friend.

You might also enjoy revisiting my following post: Digital Dossier…Footprints…Shadows

Over the past couple of weeks I have been preparing for several upcoming workshops. During one of my workshops I will be introducing K-12 teachers to the 6 +1 Traits. As part of that presentation I created some one-sheet “cheat sheets.” I used the embed feature of DocStoc to share the sheets with you today. I hope you find them helpful!

The following sites have posted some excellent (free) 6 + 1 Trait Posters that you may also find helpful:

• Edina Public Schools
• Reading Lady.com
• Writing Fix.com
• Teaching that Makes Sense
• This Little Light of Mine

Many times people ask me, “how do you find the resources that you find?” One of my favorite search strategies includes the use of various meta-search search engines. While there is no question that Google has cornered the search engine market, when you perform a search on Google you are only getting results from Google. When you perform a search using a meta-search search engine your results will often reflect Google results, as well as results from other search engines. Today, I am sharing Zuula, a new meta-search search engine I recently discovered and Clusty, a metasearch engine I have used for a while. Clusty recently added a few new options that I think you will find very interesting. So let’s get started…

Zuula makes it simple to get results from all the top search engines. Currently, Zuula offers Web, Image, Video, News, Blog, and Job searches. “Zuula provides the results from your favorite search engine unaltered, so you can check those first and then get results from other search engines simply by clicking on their tabs. If you want to switch back and forth between search engines, Zuula remembers where you were. And Zuula keeps sponsored links (which are paid advertisements) clearly separated from the regular search results.”

I found Zuula customizable and easy to use. I especially liked the fact that you set preferences for each search type and can also use preferences to select which search engines to use in a search. The search engine tabs can also be rearranged right from the search results page by dragging and dropping them. In addition, you can set the search tool to filter out (most) adult content. That feature would be even better if the adult content filter could set a password so your students would not be able to reset the preferences back to “do not filter out adult search results.”

Clusty is another metasearch engine that I recently re-discovered. “Clusty queries several top search engines, combines the results, and generates an ordered list based on comparative ranking.” Clusty currently offers Web, News, Images, Wikipedia, Blogs, Jobs, Shopping, Gov, Labs, and Customize. You can use the customize feature to add up to four additional categories. You can also set preferences to filter adult content. By the way, Clusty does not incorporate search results from Google. Clusty retrieves results from Ask, Open Directory, Gigablast and others. To see which search engines returned results for your query, click on the “Details” link at the top of the search results list.

What makes Clusty unique, however, is what happens after you search. Instead of delivering millions of search results in one long list, Clusty groups similar results together into clusters (thus, the name). I like the clustered results, as they help students see search results by topic so they can zero in on exactly what they are looking for or discover unexpected relationships between items. Clusters help students find results they might otherwise have missed or that were buried deep in the ranked list. You can easily enlarge the font size of Clusty results, making it an excellent search tool for students who are visually challenged. The larger font size also projects well on your interactive whiteboard.

Clusty also makes it easy to create a Clusty Cloud based on a topic of the user’s choice. Look below to see a sample Clusty Cloud I created using the criteria “6 + 1 Writing Traits.” Click on the various cloud words to view annotated search results.

I also used another free Clusty feature to create a Clusty Search box for my site…

	web farroutlinks.net/blog