Google | education | technology | ai & NOT A.I. | design

Search beyond Google. Wonderwheel and more

25 Mar

I do it.

My students do it.

We all do it.

We GOOGLE IT!

The easiest thing these days is to find an answer.

But is the answer always the best answer?

How many of you have gone beyond the first, second or third page in search results in Google?

How many have used tools like:

Google Scholar (for articles, legal opinions and journals)
Google Books (find whole books, partial excerpts, etc)
Google Finance (find stock quotes)
XE.com (for exchange rates of currencies and precious metals)
Survey Monkey | Survey Gizmo (for creating your own surveys)
ERIC (digital library of education literature)
OEDB.org (free online classes)
TeacherTube.com
IMDB.com (International Movie Database)
Youtube.com (many free online tutorials | courses these days)
the library
an expert
Google WonderWheel (as seen above) Wonder wheel How-to.pdf [Presently, Google Wonder Wheel seems to no longer exist. I hope the people at Google bring this option back. For now, check out Google Image Swirl, another similar product, only for images]

This is not an exhaustive list of tools-beyond-Google, but it is a list I presently use as part of criterion for my students to gather information in preparation for a project. I recommend you, as an educator, employ these techniques and others as well. Google is great, but it doesn’t always have the best answer.

For a great interactive graphic that demonstrates: Google Tools to support Bloom’s Revised Taxonomy

5 Comments

Posted by Dr. Thomas Johnson | ict-design.org on March 25, 2011 in Education, Technology

Tags: Education, Google, Google Scholar, Google Tools, List of Google products, Online, Search, search engine, Students, Teaching, Web search engine

Basic Reading in Google Search – ISTEC final notes

13 Mar

At the ISTEC meeting we had the session that I usually enjoy the most. It is a time when people come up and show a thing or two they find nifty. It is usually the cutting edge stuff that no one has seen before. For example:

Search for kids

Google – Advanced Search (basic reading age)

Go to Google – Advanced Search

Choose Reading Level:

Another great Kids Search example was:

simple.wikipedia.org – wikipedia for kids

Some of the latest resources mentioned are listed below:

dropitto.me – a dropbox add-in allows others to send files to your dropbox
edmodo – an excellent, free (course management system) CMS for teachers and students
packrati.us – adds twitter feed URLs to your delicious account
calibre – e-books library management system
epubread – allows you to read ePubs in Firefox
posterous.com – fun ways to share and collaborate online

Concerning e-portfolios, these items were presented:

livebinders – eportfolios
mahara – works with moodle
yakapaca – mentioned, but not well regarded
google sites – portable, excellent resource for creating websites

A noteworthy site to work in conjunction with those listed above:

topicmarks – summarizes text documents for you electronically

Googles redirect and how to avoid it

04 Jan

Are you a world traveler?

Do you often search Google hoping for responses in English only to find Google.com has redirected to your host countries language?

There is an easy solution to this problem.

Type: www.google.com/ncr

The “ncr” stands for No Country Redirect. Hope that alleviates some stress and helps with the simple question you probably have had many times but couldn’t ask Google because it was coming up in Turkish, or Thai or any other language you may not have understood.