New portals help children traverse the Web

tech.k12 / Joyce Kasman Valenza

We all need portals. Comfortable starting places from which we begin our explorations of the Web. Places where we can practice and hone our searching skills. Children need them, too. For children, it all started with Yahooligans, a comprehensive search tool designed for ages 7 through 12.

Yahooligans remains an effective starting point as a searchable, browsable index of the Internet. Students' searches are limited to the familiar Yahooligans database with sites selected by the Yahoo staff. Students may search using keyword strategies or browse through an extensive, indexlike list of categories and subcategories related to their interests. Editors mark recommended sites with a COOL button. "These sites may be entertaining, funny, wild, educational, and hopefully useful," explains the Web page. "Sites that are sleazy, slimy, snarly, paranoid, hateful, hideous, harmful, pornographic or prejudiced" are rejected.

But Yahooligans is no longer the only search tool on the block. New portals have opened for student use.

KidsClick!: Web Guide and Search Tool for Kids by Librarians, http://sunsite.berkeley.edu/KidsClick!/, announced in late June, now indexes more than 48,000 quality Web sites for children. The project is the initiative of a group of librarians at the Ramapo Catskill Library System in New York state who were looking for an effective way to help students find quality materials on the Internet. "When we decided to create KidsClick!, we had two goals," said Webmaster Jerry Kuntz. "Libraries are heavily involved in decisions about filtering. One of the obvious limitations of filtering technologies is that they do little to guide users to good sites. It's basically a negative approach. We wanted to demonstrate that we were doing something positive. We felt it was better to guide children to the valuable and age-appropriate Web sites. Also, we looked around at existing Web guides. In summer 1997, there was Yahooligans and nothing else. We thought we could do it better." KidsClick! was funded by a federal Library Services and Technology Act grant, with additional support from the New York state Division of Library Development and the Berkeley Digital Library SunSITE. Berkeley's Librarians' Index to the Internet, http://sunsite.berkeley.edu/InternetIndex/, was a model for the project. The group began data entry in January, using the American Library Association's 700+ Great Sites! as a starting point. Other well-respected children's Web guides were tapped, including Jean Armour Polly's book, Internet Kids and Family Yellow Pages. A group of volunteer children's librarians now keeps the database up-to-date.

Children visiting KidsClick! are greeted by a friendly green alien on his flying saucer. KidsClick!'s advanced search feature allows users to search in subject, title or description fields, and specify reading level, and quantity of pictures. Result lists are annotated and readable. They include URLs, reading levels, and a note about illustrations. Here's an example of a KidsClick! result: Gargoyles Then and Now -- http://ils.unc.edu/garg/garghp4.html "A gargoyle is a grotesquely carved human or animal figure found on an architectural structure, originally designed (believe it or not) to serve as a spout to throw rainwater clear of a building. They later became strictly ornamental and assumed many forms. This site offers images of gargoyles and explains their symbolism." KidsClick! has gained momentum in its short lifetime, currently reporting between 4,000 and 5,000 hits a day. Kuntz says he gets lots of positive e-mail feedback from school and public librarians. "I would be interested in hearing what kids think," said Kuntz, who invites students to test the site and write him.

I asked Kuntz whether he could recommend any other quality search tools for children. He suggested one of my own new favorites, Ask Jeeves for Kids."I like how the search works," said Kuntz. "The engine first looks through a database of selected sites and then does a filtered search of the Internet. In other words, first it looks for things that are good, then it looks for things that are safe."

Ask Jeeves for Kids allows children to pose questions as they would really ask them. Librarians call this "natural language searching." In response to questions like: "Why is the ocean blue?" or "What is the tallest building in the world?", a friendly butler presents a short list of matched questions. Once the child selects the closest match, he is taken to "one and only one Web site" selected by the research staff as being the most appropriate answer to the question. This approach eliminates the need to examine long result lists. If a child asks: "Who is the king of Siam?", Ask Jeeves for Kids would respond with "Who is the head of state of Thailand?" The child selects that question and is linked to the particular page that answers the question. Ask Jeeves for Kids also provides a much-needed service in a children's search tool, a spell check. When I entered "hamberger," I was greeted by the response, "I think you may have misspelled something. Did you mean: hamburger?" The Ask Jeeves knowledge base is built by human researchers, increasing the likeliness that results will be relevant to the questions children ask. Answers are pulled from thousands of "question templates" and millions of pre-researched answer links.

Joyce Kasman Valenza is the librarian at Springfield High School in Erdenheim. Her column appears each week in tech.life. E-mail: joyce.valenza@phillynews.com

Searching with kids

Try these search tools when working with elementary and middle school-aged children!

Alfy: The Web Portal for Kids http://www.ALFY.com/

Ask Jeeves for Kids http://www.ajkids.com

KidsClick! http://sunsite.berkeley.edu/KidsClick!/

SuperKids SuperSearch http://www.super-kids.com/

Yahooligans http://www.yahooligans.com

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