Search+Tools

A visual search is a great way of presenting information in a different way, especially for those learners amongst us who prefer images to text. The fact that you can interact with the cube give students a way of touching their search results, especially if it is presented on an interactive whiteboard. The following table has some details for some visual search engines and some ideas for using them in the classroom. Most of the ideas are not specific to the tool.
 * Visual Search**

Check out this site which has a list of the Top Visual Search Engines and a comparison table with details of each one. You may also be interested in this blog post: Bing - Visual Search, teaching questioning skills.

|| Search Cube is a visual search engine that presents results in the form of a 3D cube that you can then rotate and flip. When you want to select a result, you just click on the square and it will take you to that website. || * Search Cube shows image, video and websites in the results so you could get students to focus on one type and look for those results - as in, check the image results first. They would then have to move the cube to find the images. || Features:
 * **TOOL** || **DESCRIPTION** || **IDEAS FOR USE** ||
 * [[image:http://iwbchallenge.edublogs.org/files/2010/09/moz-screenshot-2.png width="267" height="104" link="@http://www.search-cube.com/"]]
 * Students could compare how many images and videos were presented compared to text based web sites. To find out what the result is before clicking on it, you just hover over it and a description will show up beside the cube as to what it is and where it is from.
 * Because of the ability to see a description of the website, students can see whether or not their search term is giving them the sorts of results they are after, and they could then discuss how they could change their search terms to get different results.
 * [[image:spezify.png width="254" height="58" link="@http://www.spezify.com/"]] || Spezify is another visual search engine that gives results from websites, images, videos, blogs, and microblogs - anywhere and everywhere really!
 * Just scroll left, right, up or down to see more search results
 * In the preferences tab you can select which websites you would like Spezify to search
 * You can collect your favourite items to come back to later
 * You can choose whether to hide images, text, or videos etc to thin out search results || Ideas for using Spezify in the classroom:
 * Students could be given the task to create a favourites page for a particular topic or project they are working on and then explain to the teacher or their group why they have selected the sites they did
 * Students could make sure they give their online work (images, blog posts, etc) a very specific tag, then search that tag and see how their work displays, and even take a screenshot of it for their blogs or portfolios. ||
 * Tag Galaxy ||  ||   ||