About Us

 Watch a Short Cartoon About Us
 

This blog was created by, and is maintained by, Dr. Michael Bell and Carole Bell, a husband and wife team who have been librarians and library system directors, as well as classroom teachers, over educational careers spanning more than thirty years each. Dr. Bell was a Spanish and history teacher as well as a K-12 librarian, library director, and Dean of a college library system.  Carole Bell was a Biology and Anatomy and Physiology teacher and also taught French.  She was also a librarian and library director for a school district.  

In addition to working on all their search engines and this blog, the Bells love to travel, especially where they can use their knowledge of French and Spanish. They love to hear from you, especially with any comments and feedback about their search engines/web sites.

Mike and Carole are the creators of six FREE Google Custom Safe Search Engines for students, teachers, and librarians.  Accessing only trusted websites recommended by librarians, teachers and library and educational consortia, these web sites also have resource pages for a growing number of subjects, ranging from art, history, languages, and literature to science, math, and technology. The Search Engines including the following:

Infotopia, designed for K-12 students, and used by students around the world, includes subjects for browsing as well as a very powerful search engine.  The background photo changes each time you refresh the page, and includes detailed information about the photo.  New topics are added very often and you can send suggestions or request topics to be added by email.(see below) It can be found at    http://www.infotopia.info 

Kidtopia, designed for K-3 students, has a "kid-friendly" look and feel and accesses web sites that are recommended for students in early elementary grades.  The background (usually a child's drawing) is refreshed each time you access it.  The "crayons" are subject headings for science, social studies, arts, language arts, people, animals, games, countries, and math.  Each of these subjects is further broken down in more topics, making browsing very easy for young children.  In addition, students can learn to do basic keyword searches and discover how to find information at their level on their own.  Kidtopia can be found at  
http://www.kidtopia.info 

 

Infotrek is a brand new search engine for high school students that will be completely ready in August 2014.  You can go ahead and test it out, but note that it is changing on a daily basis as new resources are added.   There will be a major announcement when it is "ready to go."

Infotrek is easy to navigate; students can perform a custom Google search from any page, or they can browse the topics from the subject pages.  A unique feature of Infotrek is that it provides a suggested list of topics for all subjects.  When students "click" on a topic, it automatically is placed in the search box and students find the results.  It gives students ideas for topics to research in each field. 

In addition, there are resources pages linked from the subject areas, so that students have the choice of doing a search or clicking on a well-known link for information on the topic selected.

Infotrek can be found at  http://www.infotrek.info

TeacherTopia is designed to provide teacher access to resources, lesson plans, primary source documents, student activities and more for all subjects across all grade levels. TeacherTopia is especially helpful for new teachers.  It also includes a unique feature--it allows the user to search all educational videos (not including YouTube) from one search box.  http://www.teachertopia.info/video.html

TeacherTopia can be found at: http://www.teachertopia.info

Contact Us
Please feel free to comment on any of the above search engines/web sites and/or recommend websites for inclusion by directing your e-mails to: bell@infotopia.info