Wednesday, September 30, 2009

Roll-yo Lesson

Each semester I work with 9th graders to research a natural disaster of their choosing. The students use print and non-print sources to locate details such as: causes, effects, benefits, safety precautions and other scientific facts. Typically I provide a pathfinder for the students which includes some recommended web sites. I like the idea of using Roll-yo to provide a one stop shop experience for using web resources. http://rollyo.com/mwells2920/natural_disasters/ I especially like that you can create a search widget. This is very handy if you want to embed your search bar into a wiki or website.



Unfortunately, I was not completely satisfied with Roll-yo. It was far too slow to do any function, particularly the search. I can't imagine teenagers waiting as long as I did for searchroll to conduct a simple search. I consider myself patient person, but the length of time it took to do anything was a bit ridiculus.



In the past I have used Google's Custom Search to create searchrolls and I've been very satisfied and it didn't take nearly as long to accomplish the task!

3 comments:

  1. I agree, teens probably wouldn't be interested in long wait times while it's loading. Using Google seems a much better idea! Thanks for the tip.

    FYI I think your link in this post is not what you intended. I see a link to this blog instead of to your Rollyo search page.

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  2. I don't know if I did it correctly, but I searched on my own and then posted the URL into the box rather than allow Rollyo to do the searching. Otherwise, my sessions were timing out and I was having major problems. Try to have a few tabs open next time, and run your own searches through another search engine to locate appropriate URLs. Hope this helps.

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  3. sounds as if you found a good work-around; as for Rollyo, you really only have 2 websites, and how does finding a safe cigarette address disasters?

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