Google Tools - Thing 29 Wrap Up

I was fortunate to be able to attend the TIES Conference earlier this year. The people who attended TIES from ERHS were asked to give a presentation at a staff meeting on things we learned at TIES. One of the sessions I attended was on Google and I decided to share some of the things I learned during that session. I created a presentation in Google Docs to share with our staff. I thought it would be appropriate to share here, as well. The presentation touches on even more Google tools. Google is much more than just a search engine!

Google Calendar - Thing 29

I set up a Google calendar last year during 23 Things. I use it everyday and have an iCalendar gadget on my iGoogle homepage. I had already included the US Holidays and Weather Calendars into my own calendar. Before looking at this "Thing," I thought I knew quite a bit about Google calendars.

In reading about Google calendar in this "Thing," I was disappointed to find that you need a g-mail account in order to use Twittercal. I thought that would be a useful tool. I have a Google account, but do not use g-mail, so I won't be able to add items to my Google calendar from Twitter.

I was successful in setting up a calendar for the Minnesota Mineral Club and adding it to the wiki I set up for the Club's field trips. Tonight, I'm going to talk to the Club's webmaster to see if he wants to include the Google calendar on the Club's website. I like that I will only have to update the Google calendar and it will automatically update on the wiki and website. I did struggle a little with getting the calendar into the pbwiki. Instead of inserting a Google gadget plug-in, I was only successful in adding the calendar by selecting the "Source" button and pasting the HTML code onto the wiki page. Other than that, the process was pretty smooth. Let me know if you want to try embedding a Google calendar into a wiki or web-site, I would be happy to try and help!

Google News - Thing 29

I use many Google tools on a daily basis, but Google News was not one of them. I usually just check CNN and WCCO for my daily news. When I went to Google News, it was a little confusing at first. After I discovered the "personalize" option, I rearranged the news categories, deleted "Sports", added my zip code to get local news and created specialized searches for geocaching, letterboxing, treasure hunt, minerals and fossils. I was amazed at the recent activity in all of those searches!

For student use, I think this would be a better option than Google Alerts because it is an immediate resource. I'm not sure it replaces our databases, but is something that would be available anytime and anywhere.

Google Alert - Thing 29

I have had a Google Alert set up for "SZSRocks", which is my user name for many web-sites, for quite a while. Thankfully, this alert has not provided any unpleasant surprises! Just to refresh my memory on how to set up alerts, I created one for the "Minnesota Mineral Club", an organization Steve and I are members of.

As for usefulness for the ERHS Media Center, students and/or teachers could use it for a specific topic search, but given the short amount of time for most research projects, I'm not sure if a Google alert would be the most efficient. Perhaps a Social Studies teacher could do an alert for a current world event and get daily updates.

P.S. I created the Google Alert! image at the top in Microsoft Word, using Word Art. In order to add this image to my blog, I needed to convert it to a jpeg. To do this, I selected the Google Alert! text box and copied it. I then opened Microsoft Paint under "Programs", then "Accessories" and then "Paint". I pasted the image into Paint. I sized the image and then did a "Save As" jpeg image. It worked really well. This opens up more image possibilities! Give it a try and let me know what you think!