Ben Rimes, a colleague of mine on the MACUL Board, recently wrote about this tool on his blog, The Tech Savvy Educator. Thanks Ben!

If you’re looking for a way to teach searching the web to students, this might be the answer. Although the primary audience is elementary/middle school students, it could be used by anyone. According to the site,

Boolify makes it easier to for students to understand their web search by illustrating the logic of their search, and by showing them how each change to their search instantly changes their results.

Once you begin the process by selecting a puzzle piece, the software prompts you to enter a term. After that, you build the search by adding terms or using and, or, not. The user immediately sees the results of their search “string” below so they can see what happens as they add terms or use “not” to restrict.

Search results are presented through Google’s “Safe Search STRICT” technology. There are two important caveats: a) no filtering technology is 100% secure, as this blog posting astutely points out and 2) we are unable to control or modify the results that we provide, beyond the filtering settings available through Google.