Fun & Exciting Stuff

Congress finally realizes that information technology and the use of IT is an important area for our students to succeed in. That’s why they have begun looking at this piece of legislation:

The Strengthening Kids’ Interest in Learning and Libraries or SKILLs Act guarantees that students across America will be served by highly qualified, state-certified school library media specialists and the library resources they need to succeed.

The SKILLs Act ensures that desperately-needed library funds will be available to serve students in elementary, middle and high schools throughout the nation; that appropriate books and materials will be available for students at all grade levels, including those with special learning needs and those learning English as a second language; and that highly qualified school library media specialists will be available to assist and support all our students with their learning needs.

It is a minor, minor piece to the overall education of our students, but it is a start.

I have found the blog, ReadWriteWeb to be helpful with off the beaten path technological information. One of the most interesting things from them has been this post on alternative search engines. Their winner for top alt. search engine is a site called GoshMe.

In my opinion, GoshMe is nothing short of amazing. When you go to Google and type in, for example, “coffee,” you get 197,000,000 results. When you go to one of the Metasearch engines on the List (Dogpile, mamma, gnosh, PlanetSearch, et al) you still get millions of web Pages, but they are collated from a number of different search engines. GoshMe searches across a variety of specialized search engines and databases, and for the above “coffee” example it returned about 1,200 search engine options – each one of which might have 197,000,000 results! GoshMe results are categorized and have the option to be filtered further.

GoshMe is not a metasearch engine, but I like to think of it as a Meta-Meta-Search Engine – an entire magnitude of searching above what searchers are used to. If you are prompted to register for the Beta version, go right ahead – it’s no big deal. Try a few searches to get the feel of the results.

Try it out and see what you think.