Wizenoze agrees safe search pilot project with London Grid for Learning

Wizenoze agrees safe search pilot project with London Grid for Learning

Wizenoze, a startup company aiming to curate age-appropriate, safe and understandable content for school children, is to launch a white-label search solution in partnership with The London Grid for Learning (LGfL).


Wizenoze, a startup company aiming to curate age-appropriate, safe and understandable content for school children, is to launch a white-label search solution in partnership with The London Grid for Learning (LGfL).

The project is amongst the first of its kind to offer a new method for safeguarded internet search. LGfL’s education-technology community will give their schools access to a curated content collection of trusted websites which give a large bank of suitable and reliable informational content. The search results will be matched to the Key Stages of the children in order to maximise understanding, giving children and teenagers access to trusted, safe and readable information.

The project is a response to concerns about the availability of inappropriate content to school children. A recent study from researchers at the University of Oxford casts serious doubt on the effectiveness of internet filtering, suggesting that, while parents are reassured by adding filtering to their domestic gadgets, both the suppliers and consumers of inappropriate content can easily find ways around it. This can lead to children accessing content which can frighten and shock them, but even those seeking information for homework projects can often find sites of dubious educational value.

“By using a curated content collection with millions of pages to search information, children will not be disturbed or distracted by ‘noise’ of commercial websites, or worse, by disturbing content”, says Diane Janknegt, Founder and CEO of WizeNoze. “Using our content collection can save children lots of time searching through irrelevant or manipulated search results, which are of more value to advertisers than to the child. And above all, it protects them from being confronted with harmful, inappropriate content.”

“Giving children access to safe, relevant and suitable content is a need expressed by many schools. Currently we are piloting a solution, developed by the startup WizeNoze, that is exactly doing this. Instead of filtering out all inappropriate content, we give them access to reliable information, matching the individual reading level of a child” said John Jackson, CEO of the LGfL.


Editor’s notes:

WizeNoze is an Amsterdam-based company which aims to make online information accessible and meaningful for children, teenagers, people with lower literacy skills and second language learners. At the heart of the WizeNoze platform is a set of powerful classification algorithms that facilitate evaluation of the reading level a text is written on. The algorithms are the result of years of academic research into Information Retrieval, Natural Language Processing, and Machine learning.

Diane Janknegt (Founder) would be happy to offer an opinion piece for your publication on the growing importance of overseeing the information that children access online and how the battle to provide verifiable and appropriate content has never been more important than in this era of fake news. Contact us here.

The London Grid for Learning is a community of schools and local authorities committed to using technology to enhance teaching & learning. LGfL schools receive:

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