902 CUE Workshop Calendaring Time to Search G+

Post date: Nov 30, 2014 8:18:21 AM

While I went into this weeks session with Lucie knowing quite a bit about Google Search I came away with a deeper understand and the beginning of ideas on how to put them into practice with my students. Teaching students how to effective search is very important and something I already spent hands on time with in my computer applications classes. I have been doing things like the Google a day Challenge for a while now with my students. We looked at this briefly while reviewing Google's Inside Search and then went on to the Lesson Plans and Activities.

One of the things I knew you could do but had never tried was an image search. When Lucie made that one of the challenges I was excited to give it a go and see if I could figure out who was in the image she posted in the slide show. My first challenge was dealing with a computer that was not my own so I didn't have screen caption and editing software that I was accustom to dealing with to handle the challenge. But this was a great learning experience for me because it put me in the seat of being a learner like my students in having to deal with figuring out how to deal with the challenge of an unfamiliar environment. I was a bit slower than I was happy with but I was able to complete the challenge to come up with the correct answer of Van Gogh.

I'm planning on trying an image search with students before the Winter break. Over the years students have asked what kind of trees are on the campus between the office and my classroom.. So I'm going to take some digital pictures of them and have students do an image search to find out for themselves. Yes I did try this out on Saturday afternoon when I went in for a few hours to get prepped for next week to see if would yield any results and it was successful. I just forgot to email the pictures to myself to post here tonight so I'll update later with more pictures.

As for Google+ it really got me thinking about the applications for Hangouts. I love Ben Johnson's article Using Google Hangouts For Teacher Development. I would love to try Hangouts in my District now that we have iPads for some of our PLC and collaboration time.