Thing #12: Google Tools

Google is and always has been my first stop to the internet- my homepage, my search engine, my email, my calendar... what would I do without Google?!  For instance, I use my Google Calendar everyday and it is synced to my phone- without it I would be lost.  In my previous career I used Google Translator on a monthly basis to decipher Puerto Rico's monthly environmental regulatory updates and summarize them as part of a digest for English-speaking clients.  It saved me countless hours and perhaps having to learn a foreign language.  I can definitely see how this would be helpful for students learning English in a classroom setting and am sure I will be using this Google tool in my teaching career as well. 

I had not used Google Plus Photos before and so I tried out this Google tool and uploaded pictures from our engagement and wedding and shared it as a public album.  They can be viewed by clicking on the link to my Google Plus profile beside my picture in the sidebar.  I had not considered using Google for my pictures before, but given my overuse of everything Google I might just fully convert and start using this tool as well.

Thing #11: Finding Feeds

Caution: Blog/feed searching is in fact addictive.  However, it isn't as clean of a process as I thought it would be.  Maybe it was just me, but when I used Google Blogsearch, or Technorati, I came up with a lot of irrelevant websites and newspaper articles, which I guess is a kind of old school blogging if you count the section of the paper where readers can submit their comments and elicit responses from the editor.  I found Google Blogsearch to be more familiar and user friendly and I did come across some pretty great science blogs.  For instance: Beyond the Goggles is written by a middle school science teacher who shares the tools and ideas she uses to help her students see "beyond the goggles" and that science is all around us.  Another: Science Teaching Junkie has some great classroom ideas that can be applied in a high school as well.  Other tools I used to locate newsfeeds included just searching through Feedly and also looking through the blogs of others who have commented on posts I've read.

Thing #10: RSS

That little orange button - "Real Simple Syndication," RSS, I never actually knew what that acronym stood for until today.  This simple tool I learned is a lot like Netflix.  Instead of searching for news and information, and checking through a usual list of sites, the information can be compiled and delivered to the reader, much like Netflix delivers movies to otherwise Blockbuster frequenting recipients.  I like that RSS simplifies and encourages the day-to-day activity of Lifelong Learning.  RSS allows a reader, a learner, a student, an individual to read and learn about a topic of their choice from a multitude of sources on a daily basis in a timely and efficient fashion.

Given today's students' infatuation with technology it would be a disservice not to introduce them to this tool.  In an educational setting, RSS feeds have the potential to provide more information than a teacher could ever provide during the time frame of a class period and delivers in a format the student would likely enjoy.  A teacher could easily use RSS to distribute lectures or class materials to their students, and can even be delivered by app onto a student's phone or mobile device.