Friday, August 1, 2008

Thing #17... Rollyo

Helping students narrow down their research findings by having a set of credible websites pre-selected through Rollyo sounds like great scaffolding in the often overwhelming information super-highway research world. After watching Bruce Goodner's illuminating TeacherTube video, it was really easy to repeat the steps that he modeled so well in Using Rollyo for Online Research.

I had no problem creating several searchrolls that pertained to Americana, Mexico, and France that I plan on using when I have students do a research project on a facet of one of these cultures. Hoping to find new websites I was not familiar with, I went ahead and explored other people's searchrolls but they didn't help me much in discovering new sites I liked. I was a little disappointed with the still large amount of results my Rollyo search came up with when I plugged in "Alamo" under my "Texas" Rollyo. I did however get quicker and easier results (only 2220) from sites that I trust versus 25,000,000 results in Google! Surely glad that Bruce mentioned to disregard the results with the blue background as they are sponsored by merchants...

One question --how does one remove "entire web" from the site searched windows --at the bottom of the left panel? I want the results to come only from the sites that I have pre-selected, else I feel it defeats the purpose...

2 comments:

Cheryl Laucher said...

You had more success with rollyo than I did. Will you give me a lesson?
BTW, I really like your choice of graphics in your blogs!

βG∞D said...

Thanks for the compliment! I'm glad you found my little stab at instructional video useful.

About you question dealing with "searched sites" in a panel. When are you seeing that? Is it when you do a search with one of your own rolls?