Elementary Math, Ancient Greece-6th Grade, Biomes-6th Grade, and Ancient China-6th Grade

These are groups of websites I’ve put together. When you go to any of the above web pages, you get a Google Search Engine that will use all of Google’s power to search ONLY THOSE SITES!

The advantage of using this is that you can use keyword searches to search several websites at once. Many websites have a database (aka: a search box where you can put in your search terms) that allow you to search their site very easily. One of the best sites, which has one of the cleanest interfaces of all the math sites I’ve seen is the National Library of Virtual Manipulatives. But it doesn’t have everything you might want if you’re searching for a good website to use to help you teach math. There are other sites that have a database of their own. The Google Custom Search Engine tool allows you to search all of them at once! It will even include, of course, web sites that don’t have a search box of their own.

I’m excited about this because I can send my students to these search pages and actually teach the concept and skill of performing good keyword searches, rather than sending them to just a list of links to try out, one by one. In the case of the Elementary Math Custom Search, I’m intending to allow other educators to search all of these sites at once.

Another very powerful feature of this tool is that sites can be contributed by up to 100 people!!! I invite anyone reading this who finds a great math website that you think should be part of this group of sites in this Custom Search, please send it to me. I can officially invite you through the Google page where I created the Custom Search, too..

Now, how is this different from http://del.icio.us/ ? This is another tool that I have also jumped into in a big way. I’ve been using my account consistently for quite a while now: http://del.icio.us/wark. I’ve also put a lot of math-specific sites together at this account: http://del.icio.us/math34

With Delicious, you can:

• Tag sites with categories you make up, that might or might not be words that show up when Google searches their titles, URLs, or text of the pages
• Give a quick notation to the sites you’re making public
• Put sites into categories (by the tags you make) for someone who doesn’t know what they’re looking for (and thus wouldn’t know what search terms to enter)
• Search your own (delicious) bookmarks, or all the bookmarks of all delicious users. Because of this feature, I initially thought that these two tools might not be all that different. At first, I thought…so why do this, if I can search delicious, too?

With Google Custom Search, you can

• Unleash Google’s powerful search algorithms to search through all of the sites you include
• Invite others to contribute
• Send people to your Google Custom Search in lots of ways. One is with simple links, as in the links above. Here’s another, like I’ve done with my class website. You can search right from your own website!

In 1922, Fredrick Taylor came up with a model of management planning. Henry Ford used this to organize & manage his famous assembly line. Education used this same kind of thinking to organize itself. Previously, there were 1-room schoolhouses, with teachers teaching 8 grades, with olders teaching youngers, personalized instruction, etc. As a result of the Taylor management, education became squeezed into the assembly-line mold. This was not a problem, though. In fact, it worked extremely well at the time! The problem is that the economy has changed!

We then talked about RSS feeds. It’s his view that every student, in order to graduate from high school, should know how to manage their RSS feeds.

Wikipedia should not be so much a source, but a publishing center. He challenged us to write a wikipedia article WITH our class. Lots of great discussion there.

We discussed the ways we might teach the different perspectives on the American Revolution between the US and Britain. We could fascilitate a debate between American kids and British kids. Kids prepare, they make PowerPoints using GoogleDocs, send the PPTs to each other (across the pond). They then are essentially telling each other the story from their perspective. Then a debate is scheduled via Skype. This is recorded, and it can be put up on iTunes. What a motivation!!!! Compare that to kids that just “learn” the content for the test, and then forget it the next day. The podcast would be something that the students would very likely listen to over and over, would share with many others.

He also showed us how to use Google Custom Search for several purposes. More on this on a different post.

At the “World Café” event put on by CTAP 7 the other night, Alan November showed us a tool that has me thinking. It’s the ability to set up your own search engine…sort of. It’s called Google Custom Search Engine.

You choose the sites that should be in the bank of websites that it will search. Others can collaborate in assembling those sites. People can go to your search page, put in whatever search terms they want, and it will use the Google search algorithms to search within those pages.

How does a teacher decide which to use? You’d have to really be clear about:

• who would be using your tool (delicious page or Google Custom Search)
• what the purpose would be
• and other factors

I’ll have to get my hands dirty with Google Custom Search, and do a more thorough analysis on the idea of which tool would be best for which situation…

Most of the session will consist of demonstrating the application. We will also cover “Google Sketch-Up.” Here are some links that you might find useful in getting familiar with GoogleEarth and Sketch-Up

GoogleEarth home page. Download the program and access support community, Google Sketch-Up (click on “Build 3D models”), etc. all from here.

Google Sketch-Up, 3D Warehouse. Download 3D models others have built.

Sketch-Up Help Center

My del.icio.us links tagged GoogleEarth

Wes Fryer’s del.icio.us links tagged GoogleEarth

“What’s del.icio.us?” you ask? Read this blog post. I describe it more fully there. (Here’s another post about del.icio.us)

Further down, I’ll also include some Google tips that I picked up from an article in

1. Where did the name come from?
“Googol” = the number that is 1 w/ 100 zeroes behind it
“Googol-plex” = the number that is 1 with a google number of zeroes behind it

2. Where can I find all the other features? Just above the search bar, click on “More”, then “Even More” to see LOTS AND LOTS of more features that Google has created!!

3. Google Image search – Click “Images” just above the search field.
Or, type “pics” or “pictures” as one of the search terms

4.Built-in dictionary
define:innovation
Definitions AND sources are listed!

5. File types (This one’s AWESOME!)
From Advanced Search, select “File Format” and choose PPT, for example, to find only Powerpoint presentations relevant to your search terms. Your results will ONLY be ppt’s!

6. Mobile phone compatibility!
Google is working to make as much of its features compatible with mobile phones. During this presentation, Chris demonstrating how this was a more powerful feature than calling ‘411’!

7. Google Home Page
Similar to MyYahoo pages, Google allows you to subscribe to RSS feeds and customize a home page with the information you want to see, all in one place

8. Google Alerts = “Searches that come to you via email”
Good example of a principal that did set up an alert for a search of his school name and the word “bomb”. Lots of time went by since he set up the alert, and lo and behold! – he got an email – a student had blogged about this, and he was able to quickly deal with the issue.
9. Google Docs & Spreadsheets
Online word processor and spreadsheets
Collaborate VERY effectively; Much like a wiki

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The following are Google tips that were published in an article by Jeffrey Branzburg in Technology & Learning in 2004. It was interesting that I do some of these, I use “Advanced Search” for some of these, and some of these are a bit obscelete.

• Plus and minus signs (typing + before the term will include it; typing – will exclude it)
• Tilde sign – typing “~” before the search term will also search for synonyms of the search term
• OR (searches for either of the search terms)
• Type your calculation, like “sqrt(267)“, and you will be given the answer (in this case, to “What’s the square root of 267?”
• Definitions: type “definition”, followed by word)
• I dunt spel so gud – It has a spell-checker, which anticipates what you meant to type. It asks, “Did you mean…“
• News: If your search term is related to current news, there will be a section at the top of your hit list labeled “News results for…” with direct links to the related news story.
• Find an addresss (type in first name, last name, and city to find a person’s address & phone number)
• Maps – Type street address, and you will be given a GoogleMap of the location
• Reverse phone lookup (Type in phone number: (XXX) XXX-XXXX)
• Delete your personal information from Google database for Maps, Phone Book, and Address Features, go to www.google.com/help/pbremoval.html to request removal

Sadly, I must admit that I don’t use all of these … yet. Thinking about them makes me drool over the possibilities, though. It’s a bit overwhelming, isn’t it?
Writing this all down helps me to think though what’s possible, again, to think about what my next step will be.

If any of you have any additional tips to share, please comment on this article to share with the rest of us!