Today we are looking at various features of google search. One of the aspects that i looked into was customizing a google search. Basically this allows a person to go in and set up a google search bar to put on a website that will only search through a few different sites that are specified. This would be a great addition to a teacher's classroom homepage. Student could use this customized search to look for topics on websites that have already been pre approved by the teacher. A great advantage to this is that both parents and teachers know that when using this search a child is not going to accidentally stumble onto a website that could be deemed inappropriate. Also, since teachers will have pre approved the websites, they know that the information that the students are getting is accurate.
I also looked at creating google alerts. This allows someone to create an alert so that each time a new article about a specific topic is added the person receives and e-mail about it so that they can check it out and stay up to date on certain topics. It is really easy to do, you simply tell google what the topic is you are searching, what type of results you want to be informed about, how often you want to receive the alerts, and how many alerts you want to receive. This could be very beneficial to teachers as they could more easily keep up to date with educational issues, and new ways of teaching, and even new educational games. Instead of having to go on every now and then and do a search and wade through the different sites to find new and useful resources, instead they would be delivered right to the teachers inbox. This would be a great way to save time in discovering new educational resources.
The other google feature that I looked at was the advanced google search. This is something that i have use, but not often, so i didn't know much about it. Advances search allows users to search for more than just a single word of phrase. They can specify exact words or phrases to search for, numbers between a certain range to search for, or even words to avoid. What I liked about the advanced search was how many different ways that you could narrow down a search. You could search for results in a specific language, by the last time that it was updates, or even by reading level. Being able to search by reading level would be very beneficial when teaching elementary school, because you want to make sure that your students can understand what they are reading. You can even filter you search, which I think is really interesting because when using this with students whether inside or outside school, it is important to make sure that students are not going to accidentally stumble upon something that they shouldn't see, so the ability to put a safe filter on the search is a great feature.
Over all, google search has some great features that could be very useful for teachers to use, and it takes no time at all to learn how to use them.
Excellent!
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