Thing #7

I love Google and all the tools it has to offer. I created an iGoogle page for my home page. I put the time and date on it, breaking news, links to strange things found on Google Earth, and live weather. The live weather works for me better than a Google alert.

Earth Google is a wonderful tool. I asked the technology department in my school district to put a link to it on the same page with our databases and other useful links. They refused saying that the free version was too outdated to be of use to our students. The free version was updated as recently as six months ago, and that's good enough for me, but our students cannot download it to the computers. What a shame. It is so exciting when you add buildings and tilt the image to view the earth from different angles. There are built-in tours to famous places, too. (I moved recently and use Earth Google to find restaurants and ATM machines.)

I will definitely suggest Google Scholar to my high school students. After I show them the excellent databases and explain to them that the Internet is great for some things, but not for scholarly research such as literary criticisms on American literature, they go to the computers and immediately go to Yahoo. Now I can show them Google Scholar to use as a starting point. That will be a win-win situation.

I plan to use Google Calendar with an extra-curricular club that I sponsor. It will be great for sharing meeting dates and the schedule for our activities. I do have a calendar on the school's web page, but with Google Calendar I can email the students. They would prefer texting, but I'm not there yet!

Google Docs will be so useful with my library staff. There are three of us in the library and we always email documents as attachments to each other for proofreading and editing. Google Docs will be so much better since we can all work on the documents and the version each one of us sees will be current. I hope that we can use this tool at work, but we are restricted from using so many tools on the Internet. For example, I keep my bookmarks/favorites on a website called ikeepbookmarks.com, but I cannot access it at work.

Google Advanced Search is wonderful. All the boolean search formulas are built in. You can enter phrases without adding quotation marks, enter words that you don't want searched, select returns only from .mil if that's what you want, and look specifically for PowerPoint presentations if needed. At the bottom of the Advanced Search page is a link to universities. This is so helpful to high school students beginning their college search. It's also good for finding course schedules and alumni news. The counselors will like this one. The U.S. Government link has government news stories, White House news, and information about the American Forces. Good for history, government, current events.