Recently, the Pennsylvania Department of Education bought netTrekker d.i. licenses as a gift for all teachers, students and parents in the state.
An alternative to free Web search engines such as Google, netTrekker offers access to more than 180,000 online resources selected by educators. The resources are organized by reading level and aligned with Pennsylvania state standards. It is a product I like and well may learn to love - if improvements are made.
The "d.i." in the product's title refers to features that assist educators in differentiating instruction.
So, searchers can select interfaces designed for elementary, middle or high school users. Specialized resources are identified for English-language learners and their teachers.
Cool dictionary and translation hot keys explain challenging words. The Multicultural Pavilion addresses the interests of various groups in our schools.
The product has a number of useful classroom features. Its effective image search guides students to "safe, pornography-free images." A "famous person search" allows users to specify sex, time period, occupation and heritage. Time-line searches arrange Web content chronologically for such areas as American and British literature, physics and U.S. history.
Though I think this search tool has great potential for classroom use, I have some concerns with its results rankings, the quality and depth of the selected sites, and the consistency of the reviews. And my initial two-hour trial run of searches turned up more than 15 grammatical and spelling errors in the teacher-created annotations.
Encarta's free concise encyclopedia, the Columbia (concise) Encyclopedia, encyclopedia.com and Wikipedia content often come up first in netTrekker's result lists, often obscuring the resources with greater depth. Though users may use the "refine search" features to eliminate Wikipedia or to select sites from one domain type, the average user is not likely to go to the trouble.
For high-school-level students, these free encyclopedia-type resources have limited research value. They are hardly equal to the full versions of the licensed online resources some libraries already subscribe to for learners, and those the state provides through the Access PA POWER Library, www.powerlibrary.net/Find.htm.
Free Web directories, such as Librarians' Index to the Internet, http://lii.org, have equal or higher standards for selection, depth and annotation. KidsClick!, http://kidsclick.org/, and Multnomah's Homework Center, www.multcolib.org/homework/, are similarly strong free efforts.
NetTrekker's teacher editors point to many wonderful teacher-created sites, as well as some not-so-special resources created by teachers. Many of those personal teacher sites do not list their sources. For instructional resources, I will check netTrekker, but I also will continue to visit such juried sites as GEM, at http://thegateway. org, or Bernie Dodge's database of WebQuests, http://webquest. org/.
I spoke with Steve Nordmark, netTrekker's new director of product development, who was most sincere and eager to address my concerns. He noted that he had already begun to work on those I had posted on my blog. In fact, one of my concerns about relevance ranking was addressed in the last few days. He described new strategies for checking and proofing annotations and for organizing results. He took detailed notes on all my suggestions and those I shared from my colleagues.
"We are sincere about continuous improvement and dedicated to listening to our customers and addressing their feedback," he said.
I believe this product will continue to grow.
NetTrekker is a fine gift from our state. It points our learners to a significant number of quality sites. But it is still up to the student, teacher or parent to decide whether he or she is finding the quality or the content needed for the task at hand.
For netTrekker accounts and passwords, contact your local Intermediate Unit.