Thing #12--Rollyo

http://www.rollyo.com/lamslibrarylady/lams_library_tools/ is my Rollyo Search. On my website (www.lamslibrary.org) I found websites to help teachers, other librarians and students with their information gathering. What I like about Rollyo is its ability to grab your search term and place it in the right area on the sites listed in your own personal searchroll. What is the difference with Rollyo and a bookmarking site? The bookmarking site lists your favorite sites for all to see and use. The Rollyo site will search those sites automatically (or any site you list) and give you the results. Now I did notice that it didn't pick up on all the sites I gave but it did search a majority of them. This can help in research projects where similar sites are used to gather information. For example: when I give information literacy instruction to my students I always give them a list of sites to use, starting with the most important first, (Power Library, Grolier, Netrekker and Mister-Wong (my bookmarking site), and sites tailored to middle school researching. Now I can still give them that list but explain that some sites for researching can be accessed all at one time by using Rollyo.

I am not sure if this is something I would use until the bugs are out of the system. What I do now is when a teacher comes in for research and gives me their list of websites that they want the students to use I place this information on my website under the teacher's name. So the students would go to my website, click on Library Resources and then click on Presentation Materials. I still tell them to go to Power Library, etc... but then they would also go to the resources that the teacher listed.