Do you have safe search engines at your school? If not then try out the two listed in this review, I have tried and tested these with students ages 5-9. They are very easy to use for your younger students and quite safe. Safe as in you won’t get any nasty surprises when using keywords to search for seemingly inoffensive things. It also links very nicely with digital citizenship and whole-school tech. Let’s have a look at Junior and Kid Rex. Both of which use Google’s SafeSearch technology – which admittedly I haven’t looked into in that much detail.
Junior – Safe Search For Kids.
Junior is the first safe search engine I used, created by two parents from Canada who wanted to make internet browsing safer for their kids! After you have typed in your search criteria into the search box, your results are displayed in relevance (or date order), with a small image beside each link; useful for younger students. You can then explore more pages, using the page numbers at the bottom of each page. It also has a feature to search for images separately. Simple and easy to use.
KidRex
I’m not sure who created KidRex, but it works in a very similar fashion to Junior, in that you have a main search box to type in your search criteria, the results are displayed, together with images with each link. However, it doesn’t have a separate feature for searching for images, but I did find that it filtered out more results than Junior, perhaps a little safer…
Which Safe Search Engine to Use?
I have both links installed on any digital device for years 1-5, which I use with the students. Of course, you can just go with Google, Bing, or Yahoo and let your school’s filter do the work, but I think this introduces internet searches in a relatively safe environment for our children. It also doesn’t overload our students with tons of information that they will have to sift through. There are plenty more safe search engines out there, such as Kiddle, Safe Search Kids, and so on. Get there and try a few and safe searching everyone!