I am thrilled to have learned how to create a custom search.  With Career and College Readiness Standards, there have been a lot of discussion about relevance.  This new skill is not only relevant to my teaching, it's also timely.  My students will be researching the attacks of 9/11 this week.  My custom search is EXACTLY what I needed to assist them and be assured that they were on task and getting good information.  There are times when I set a group of twenty-eight 8th graders loose on a quest on the internet and do my circling around the room to monitor if they are truly researching but know there are sites I don't really want them to access.  This feature allows my students to search inside the websites I have reviewed and know to be safe.  It makes me happy, makes the tech department happy and I have to think the students will be happy to have one step of the process already complete!  To try out my search engine, type in any question you may have about the official reports or the conspiracy theory of 9/11.  Look in the next post to see if the students were happy about this feature!