Whenever the experts tell you the best way to use the Internet in your classes, they always tell you to create a webpage with the sites you want to use. This way the students’ research is focussed and they don’t wander off to sites that contain innappropriate material.

Yet if you’re teaching the kids how to use the Internet, teaching them to search is also part of the package. So how do you make sure that if they search they don’t spend endless amounts of time searching inappropriate sites?

Google Coop to the rescue! The Google Coop program allows you to create a search engine that will only search the sites you tell it to. If there’s two sites that your students should be looking at, only enter those two. If there’s fifty sites, well, enter all of those.

Creating the search engine is fairly simple. If  you can browse the web, you can probably do it. However, you do need to register with Google and create a Google ID. If you have a Gmail account, you’ve alreay got your ID and are good to go.