Elementary Research Projects? Try Kiddle.co

Looking for a way to help your students learn to do research? Are you frustrated with trying to sort through thousands of websites to find age appropriate resources? Kiddle.co may be just the answer you are looking for.

Kiddle.co is powered by Google’s safe search tools and returns websites that have been hand-picked by editors to suit the needs of younger students. The results are displayed with a large thumbnail picture and are formatted with kids in mind.

When you are ready to have your students start their research, direct them to the website kiddle.co first. They can type their search terms in the box, just like with Google. They will get fewer results that will be geared towards student learners. For example, a search for tigers on Google returned over 200 million results. The first return was from Wikipedia and the second was the Twitter handle for the Detroit Tigers baseball team. Not exactly the highest quality sources for a student trying to learn about tigers. In contrast, the same search on Kiddle returned 45 million results. The first hit was from the website sciencekids.co.nz and the third linked to pbskids.org.

Kiddle.co is not without its faults. Some searches will return ads along the right hand side. While they are clearly labeled as ads, it will be important to teach students the difference between search results and ads. As with any Internet activity, student use of Kiddle.co should be monitored. Also, the image search tool in Kiddle does not have the same usage rights filtering options that Google.com utilizes. It may be best to have students return to Google.com when they are looking for pictures.

Google provides some filtering options that will allow you and your students to find images with appropriate licenses. Do an image search in Google. Once the search results pop up, click search tools and filter your results to show images “Labeled for Reuse.”

The images left in your results are images that are licensed as Creative Commons or Public Domain. There is a common misperception in education that it is okay to use images freely. It is important to teach our students how to find images that are okay to use and how to give appropriate attribution.

[Edited to correct incorrect attribution to Google as the designers of Kiddle. Kiddle is not affiliated with Google, but utilizes Google’s safe search tools along with being curated by editors. 3/4/16]