Topmarks
is a mine of information for teachers, parents and pupils alike. The
search engine features only the best educational resources carefully
selected by teachers. It has a keyword search option as well as the
facility to browse by age group and/or subject. Topmarks prides itself
on keeping 'dead' links to a minimum through regular checks of featured
sites. The Teachers' Area provides opportunity for Internet interaction
with other schools both in the UK and further afield. Practitioners
can also use the Teachers' Forum to share ideas. The Parents' Area
provides advice and information on preparing children for school to
give them the best start, together with a useful selection of sites
to help make sense of educational jargon. The site is clearly laid
out and is easy to navigate, enabling children and those not so familiar
with the World Wide Web to use the Internet effectively, especially
as a homework helper.
Kevin's
Playroom is a unique multi award winning web site produced by
children for children, listing all school subjects with hundreds of
approved links to curriculum based information. The site is aimed
at children from pre-school (working with parents) to primary, junior
and secondary pupils to assist with class work and homework tasks.
It also has a big kids section which is proving very popular with
teachers and pupils for project work, as here you can compare the
different mobile phone tariffs, find comparative costings for holidays
and flights etc. all without leaving the classroom.
Schoolzone:
The Schoolzone website is based around an educational search engine
designed to help you find good material on the internet. Set up by
parents and teachers in 1996 there is no charge for usage and content
is arranged into three areas: students, teachers and parents. The
Schoolzone site indexes and has in searchable format: 40,000 UK teacher
reviewed educational resources; educational events all around the
UK; schools database; school suppliers database; software reviews;
links to on line games, free downloads and shareware; homework helpers;
revision guides; educational news; exam boards; fundraising ideas
and competition listings.
Teaching
and Learning: The Teaching and Learning section of TeacherNet
is a gateway to the very best educational resources currently available
on the internet. From this page you can access more than twelve hundred
lesson plans, tap into the support services of museums, libraries
and charities and ensure that you are making the most of the educational
activities that your local community has to offer. You will also find
comprehensive directories for Community Learning Grids, teaching unions
and other affiliated bodies.
WWW
Virtual Library: The WWW Virtual Library is the oldest directory
on the web and is still one of the best for finding educational material
on the Internet. Started by Tim Berners-Lee, the creator of the web
itself, it is run by a collection of volunteers who compile pages
of key links for particular areas in which they have expertise. A
small number of people at Stanford University administer the main
catalogue pages and provide the links to the individual indexes on
different servers all over the world. As the directories are being
maintained by expert enthusiasts lists tend to be comprehensive and
provide links to high quality educational materials.
Learning
Websites: David
Levin, the Director of the Library Media Centre at Rich Central High
School, Olympia Fields, Illinois, has created one of the most useful
websites for students and educators on the Internet. The material
is organized by departments. As well as the traditional school subject
areas there are also categories such as Social Workers' Office, Library
Media, Guidance/Counselling, Vocational Technologies, Multicultural
Resources, Field Trips and Professional Development. Websites are
reviewed and awarded symbols that illustrate the quality and quantity
of the educational content.
Needle
in a CyberStack:
The Needle in a CyberStack
is an interesting directory website produced by John Albee, a teacher
from Davenport, Iowa. The listed websites cover a wide range of subjects
and has been designed to help people find their way around the net.
Although most of the websites included on Needle in a CyberStack are
based in the United States, Albee attempts to maintain a worldwide
perspective and includes many links to useful resources for British
students and educators.
Education
World: In 1996 a group of people with a background in education
in the United States decided to produce a website that would make
the Internet easier for educators to use. The result is Education
World, a resource that includes a search engine for educational websites,
a place where educators can find information without searching the
entire Internet; original content, including lesson plans, practical
information for educators, information on how to integrate technology
in the classroom, and articles written by education experts; website
reviews; daily features and columns; teacher and principal profiles.
Search
Engine Watch provides up-to-date information on all the major
search-engines. A recent report published by Forrester Research argued
that search engines are the leading way people locate websites. Google
currently carries out 130 million searches a day. Other important
players include Inktomi (80 million), Alta Vista (50 million), Direct
Hit (20 million), Fast (12 million), GoTo (5 million) and Ask Jeeves
(4 million). Google
also has the largest database of web pages indexed (2000 million).
Others include Fast (625 million), Alta Vista (550 million), Inktomi
(500 million), Excite (380 million) and Northern Light (390 million).
Web
100: With reviews
of sites and ratings by users, Web 100 makes it easy to locate the
Internet's top sites. Rather than overwhelming you with listings of
hundreds of thousands of Web pages, the Web 100 provides an easily
accessible selection of 100 sites in areas such as education. Web
100 compile ratings and rank the sites from 1 to 100. The programs
also select a featured site each hour and provide a tally of statistics,
such as the sites getting the most votes and those moving up and down
in the rankings.
Top9:
This is the Internet's first Search Directory to use consumer intelligence
to comprehensively rank the most popular websites by industry category
on a monthly basis. The rankings are compiled by PC Data Online and
are based on surveys with over 120,000 home users on the Internet.
Currently in the Education Resources section the top nine are Spark
Notes (2,647 unique users), Thinkquest (1,852), Pink Monkey (706),
Blackboard (680), School Notes (457), Grade Saver (402), UMI (328),
Educate (317) and Planet Papers (238).
BBCi
Web Search: The BBC has launched its own online search engine.
The new service allows users to search the entire web from within
the confines of the BBC website. The search-engine, developed in-house
by the BBC in conjunction with Google, is designed to be particularly
useful for those new to the web. Ashley Highfield, the director of
BBC New Media argues that "the BBC, with its 80 years of know-how
and editorial expertise, is ideally placed to provide a UK-focused
search engine that will not be tainted by paid-for results."
Google
Answers: Everybody has questions. In most cases, Google search
is an incredibly fast way to answer them. But some questions are trickier
or more time-consuming than others. To help users over those hurdles,
Google has launched Google Answers, a service powered by human researchers
with search expertise. When you post a question, you say what you're
willing to pay and how quickly you need a reply. To spread the benefit
around, your answer is posted to the Google Answers site. Google Answers
boasts a research team with expertise in areas from biochemical engineering
to public policy.
Search
Engine Ratings: NetRatings has began releasing figures showing
the total number of people performing searches at popular search engines
and portals, along with the average time spent by these searchers
at these sites. Figures are for users in the United States. At the
top of the list in search hours is Google, where users spent nearly
13 million hours searching during March 2002. In second-place was
Yahoo with 5.4 million search hours, followed by MSN Search with 4.9
million search hours logged. According to StatMarket, Google accounts
for more search referrals than any other search engine. According
to this research, based on worldwide traffic measurements in April
2002, Google was responsible for 47 per cent of search referrals worldwide,
followed by Yahoo at 21 per cent, then MSN Search at 8 per cent and
AltaVista at 6 per cent.
Ask
Jeeves attempts to understand the precise nature of the question
by using a question-processing engine. Using natural language processing
technology, Ask Jeeves determines both the meaning of the words in
the question (semantic processing) as well as the meaning in the grammar
of the question (syntactic processing). Ask Jeeves's answer-processing
engine provides the question template response (that's the list of
questions that users see after they ask Jeeves a question). When the
user clicks on a response, the answer-processing engine retrieves
the answer template that contains links to the answer locations. The
Ask Jeeves knowledge base contains links to more than 7 million answers,
which contain information about the most frequently asked questions
on the Internet.
Computer
Active Web Guide: The best website guide available and it only
costs £4.99. Sections include Arts & Literature, Food &
Drink, Music, TV & Radio, News, Reference, History, Finance, Cars
& Bikes, Computers, Travel, Science & Nature, Kids, Education,
Health & Fitness, Leisure & Hobbies, Home & Garden, Sport
and Portals. There is also a CD that contains all the website reviews
and directory listings. In addition, all of the URLs on the CD form
clickable hyperlinks.
Best
of History Web Sites: Designed for history educators and students,
Best of History Web Sites is a useful portal that provides convenient
access to many of the best history resources online. The portal provides
descriptions and ratings of hundreds of excellent history-oriented
web sites, all organized into ten main categories: Prehistory, Ancient
History, Medieval History, US History, Early Modern European History,
20th Century History, World War II History, Art History, General History
Resources, and Maps. There are also three special categories: Lesson
Plans/Activities, Multimedia, and Research. Best of History Web Sites
also contains a special informative section on Teaching With Technology
that offers articles and advice about integrating computers in the
classroom. In this section you will also find links to dozens of useful
resources on educational technology.
Mr.
Flack's Ultimate Educational Resources: Jim Flack of Lancaster,
Ohio, has produced a resource website encompassing all curriculum
areas. Listed as a Yahoo! K-12 Teaching Web Directory and a winner
of the USA Today "Best Bets For Educators" award. The website
has 10,000+ active links and and has been visited by over 75 countries.
Kids
Net: A search engine designed for children. The site, based in
Australia, contains over 20,000 child safe sites, and over 4000 categories.
Categories include: Arts, Computers, Directories, Entertainment, Games,
Health, News, People and Society, Pre-School, School Time, Sports
and Hobbies, and Family. Kids Net contains sites and categories that
are of direct interest to children, in this regard the site is a niche
search engine for children.
HERO:
Higher Education and Research Opportunities - is the official national
portal into Higher Education in the UK. The purpose of the site is
to provide a comprehensive, clearly annotated and easily navigable
body of links to all relevant HE related bodies and activities and
to effectively highlight the world-class work carried out within the
sector.
Google:
In 1937 H. G. Wells travelled around the world promoting his World
Brain scheme. His plan was to create a vast repository that contained
every piece of knowledge in the world. He argued that the World Brain
would be freely available to everyone and would therefore eliminate
the ignorance that sustained tyranny. His scheme never got off the
ground but some observers have claimed that Google is on the way to
becoming this World Brain. A recent report by OneStat reveals that
Google now carries out 53.2 per cent of all web searches. Yahoo!,
the second largest, has only 20.4 per cent. This is followed by MSN
Search (9.1), Terra Lycos (3.7), AOL Search (2.9), Altavista (2.8)
and Ixquick (2.2).
Google-Watch:
Daniel Brandt is founder and president of Public Information Research
(PIR) and programmer and webmaster for the organization's several
sites including Google-Watch, a website that monitors the activities
of Google. Brandt argues that Google's "crawlers" (software
which creeps daily through the web to monitor and catalogue new and
changing websites) are prejudiced in favour of larger and older websites.
Brandt suggests that Google is now so powerful that it should be registered
like a public utility company.
Scout
Report: Published every Friday, continuously since 1994, the Scout
Report is one of the Internet's oldest and most respected publications.
It offers a selection of new and newly discovered online resources
of interest to researchers, educators, and anyone else with an interest
in high-quality online material. Every
day professional librarians, educators, and content specialists filter
hundreds of announcements looking for the most valuable and authoritative
resources available online. Information about the best of what we've
found is then summarized, organized, and provided to the Internet
community in various formats, including email and the Web. The Internet
Scout Project is located in the Department of Computer Sciences at
the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and is sponsored by the National
Science Foundation.
Open
Directory: The Open Directory Project is the largest, most comprehensive
human-edited directory of the Web. It is constructed and maintained
by a vast, global community of volunteer editors and is the most widely
distributed data base of web content classified by humans. The Open
Directory provides the means for the Internet to organize itself.
The plan is for well-informed individuals to organize a small portion
of the web and present it back to the rest of the population, culling
out the bad and useless and keeping only the best content.
Education
Index Web: This website, created by Hobsons, an international
college and career publisher, claims to provides a guide to "the
most useful education-related sites on the Web." The website
can be browsed by subject or by lifestage, from prenatal and infant
all the way to college and continuing education. Since it went online
in September 1996, the Education Index has grown to more than 3,000
sites in 66 different categories.
Google
News Portal: A recent addition to the Google website is a news
portal that will serious challenge market leaders News Now and Moreover.
Everyday it groups together the interesting stories that are developing
and then links you to the best news sites for those particular stories.
At the moment the site searches 4,000 news sources but this will increase
rapidly over the next few months.
NewsSeer:
NewsSeer is both a straightforward news search engine and an adaptive
tool that's constantly learning your interests to deliver personalized
news tailored to your own needs. In addition to its search capabilities,
NewsSeer will attempt to learn your interests by using several criteria
from the material you select to view. This includes article selection,
the text of the article, how long you looked at a story, the source
of the material and the age of the story. This process is automatic.
However, you can also choose to assist NewsSeer by rating your interest
in the story.
The
Internet Public Library (IPL): One of the most popular library
sites on the Internet. IPL visitors can read online books, magazines,
or newspapers; browse links to carefully selected websites for children
and teens; and receive personalized assistance from an award-winning
team of volunteer librarians. The website is operated by the School
of Information at the University of Michigan.
WelshQuest:
This search engine helps you find documents on this website and related
sites (BritQuest, ScottishQuest, IrishQuest). You tell the search
service what you're looking for by typing in keywords, phrases, or
questions in the search box. The search service responds by giving
you a list of all the webpages in our index relating to those topics.
The most relevant content will appear at the top of your results.
Schoolzone
School Search: Schoolzone claims that this is the UK's only complete
listing of schools, colleges and LEAs (these organisations can amend
or add to their details using a PIN). The Schoolzone website also
has a collection of 40,000 educational websites, all hand picked for
suitability and reviewed and categorised by UK teachers.
Journalist's
Toolbox: This website features more than 17,500 Web sites helpful
to the media and anyone else doing research. Use the pulldown menu
or search engine to locate information from a variety of beats and
news industry related topics. The Journalist's
Toolbox E-Newsletter features search tips, new resources and other
news and notes of interest to the journalism, research, academic and
online communities.
HotBot:
Since its launch in 1996, HotBot has been named the Number One search
site on the Web in independent reviews from the top consumer-oriented
computer and personal-finance publications in the United States. HotBot
indexes every word, link, and media file on more than 160 million
Web documents and refreshes its entire database of documents every
three to four weeks. It also allows users to construct sophisticated
search queries of its index without previous knowledge of complex
search terms and methodologies. Instead, HotBot offers users a simple,
point-and-click interface, intuitive pulldown menus, and the ability
to use plain English terminology for constructing searches.
ilectric:
The ilectric info portal is an online directory and metasearch engine.
Created in September 2000 by Justin Schlecter, owner of UpsideOut
Web Services, ilectric has grown into a robust suite of research tools.
The website handles about 6,000 searches from 18,000 unique visitors
every day. The portal is 100% standards compliant with the the World
Wide Web Consortium's specifications for valid HTML and CSS to ensure
that our pages are accessible to all. We update the site almost every
day with new features and bug fixes.
Zap
is a multilingual website for children and teenagers aged 8-14 with
fun and educational activities. In addition to offering tips on netiquette
and safe surfing, based on research into young people's behaviour
and needs on the Internet. It is a fun and educational place for children
and teenagers to learn more about school-related topics and at the
same time gain Internet skills. There is also a safe search engine
of quality-checked sites.
Do you
want to have your website listed in our web directory? If so, send
a brief description (about 150 words) and the URL to spartacus@pavilion.co.uk.
