AOL Gives School Kids a Toolbar

Teachers pull their hair out watching students driven to distraction by Internet search engines. Even if the kids are trying to stay on track (which the Internet makes difficult), there are so many ways they can find themselves—like Pinocchio—heading off to Pleasure Island instead of school. You search for Ethan Allen and you get a furniture store, not the guy from Vermont. You search for an image of a daffodil or daisy and there's no telling "whom" not "what" you'll turn up.

The problem is one of context. And one of the buzzwords you'll be hearing a lot about this year is contextual search—a search that makes certain assumptions about who you are and what you want as you search for content.

AOL@SCHOOL, a popular destination for teachers and students that includes 48,000-plus carefully vetted websites, is now available as a contextual search toolbar. AOL teamed up with Intellext's Watson, a contextual search technology, so that AOL@SCHOOL can now live as a sidebar on the desktop.

This means that students and teachers can search these selected websites without leaving their current application and opening a browser, making the whole process more fluid and natural. According to an email from Intellext, "Because the AOL@SCHOOL Search Sidebar understands the context of the student's work, the results are more relevant and, since they are delivered automatically, the student doesn't have to interrupt his or her work to go and find information—it's already sitting in the sidebar waiting for them to access it."

The toolbar is free. It works with Microsoft Word, PowerPoint, Outlook, and Internet Explorer as well as Mozilla Firefox and can be downloaded from AOL@SCHOOL.