The Google Research Tool in Google docs

I noticed this  yesterday when I was doing a quick document on Google Docs to record what had happened in a meeting, whoooah “what is that happening on my sidebar” I thought.  Turns out I had stumbled upon the newest feature in the Google Docs department.  The Google Research Tool.  They’ve been blogging about it over on the Bright Ideas blog too!  Here is how it works (thanks Bright Ideas, love your work).

This has lots of interesting implications for our students as it pushes keyword searches straight into their documents.  Clever stuff.  As many schools are using to Google as an entire school platform I think it needs lots of critical and information literacy to get students sifting as they create documents.

Image via CrunchBase

If you still aren’t using Google Docs for documents which need more than one person to work on them (or even for all your wordprocessing) then you are missing out on one of the best tools on the internet.  So many ways they are useful, so many hours saved.  I now have most of my templates on there from the library timetable master to policy documents which get changed every year.

Watch the Video here to see the latest tricks.

You Tube Tricks

Image via CrunchBase

Joyce Valenza has posted a great guide to using You Tube.  You can find it here. As she says in the post, there are lots of times when you want to show students or other staff a You Tube clip but you don’t need all of it and you don’t want to start at the very beginning.  Learn how to cue it to start when you want it to start.

You can find helpful You Tube tips galore in the post.  In fact it would take a bit of time to work through them all.  You will find Copyright, Tips on Sharing, help with music for your videos and a whole heap more.  But wait, there’s more!  There are more links in the comments.

Getting to grips with Google Reader

I know that many many readers of this blog will use Google Reader every day, but many of the teaching staff I talk to, and librarians too for that matter, wonder at the ability of some of us to munch through so many blogs, gleaning good stuff and sharing it around.  Google Reader makes it easy.

The RSS feed is the key to all this blog reading goodness.

Sue Waters has written a really great explanation of how to manage your blog reading life using RSS feeds and Google Reader. If you struggle to keep up with online reading, or you are looking for a clear introduction to using Google Reader then her article is certain to help you.

You will find it here.  You will also find all kinds of good things on the blog, it is specifically for people using Edublogs but even though I don’t use that platform I find lots of really good things on The Edublogger.

Blogging 101

Lots of people want to blog (see this post) (or this one) and there are lots and lots of helpful places you can go online to get instructions, including at the various blog providers, but I thought this blog worth taking a look at if you are keen to head down the Blogger route.  Nice clear instructions and fantastic images and screen shots to help you along the way, great embedded document with helpful stuff in there too.  It is called Bling For Your Blog and the blogger is Allanah King of Moturoa Classroom at Appleby School.  She has some great links to her other blogs and presentations on there too.  In fact Allanah King is a bit of an ICT legend.  Check out this article from New Zealand Educational Review, posted on her other blog.  Awesome.

One thing to note:  This is done with the Old Blogger stylings.  The new Blogger stylings are much stylier, and easier to work with.  Now you won’t get the option to choose the older style, if you haven’t blogged on your blogger account for a while you might find the video below helpful.

How good are you at searching?

Over on the Blue Skunk blog a couple of days ago an interesting discussion was taking place.  Where do professionals learn search skills?  We are quick to criticise the search skills of the students (and staff) we work with but how good are we ourselves?

Google is always the quick answer, but is it the best answer?  Read the comments on the post and see what you think.  There are also links on there to some excellent Google tools which you may be familiar with, but if you aren’t then go try them.  The include:

Noodletools Choose the best search engine for your information needs and

Google Tutorials which have been mentioned on this blog before.

My personal fave Let me Google that for you

Got good ideas to contribute from a local perspective?  Add them to the comments below.

Google this way

I’ve been reading this post on Mindshift.  It is an interview with Daniel Russell, a “search anthropologist” who is detailed to look after your search quality and best of all he is a User Happiness expert.  It lead me to search for him and I found lots of stuff but loved the presentation below best.  You can watch him give a presentation if you want to and find it here.  It is a keynote which is funny, clever and engaging and his comments on Information Overload, Infowhelm anyone?   Find out what the future of Google is, and when listening know that Google+ was minutes away when the talk was given.  His stats might frighten you a little bit.  Really, they can index a tweet in Google in 4 seconds?

Google have plenty of resources to help the search challenged.  Have a look at the links below.

Posters you can print out with search help, strategies and more.  I have these on the walls above the bank of computers in my library for the students to ignore!

Basic Search Help

Learn some of the features other than search

The Google Guide – a pdf that takes a bit to load because it is big (148 pages)

Google for Educators – all kinds of Google Goodness within here including the following …

Take a look at Start Your Engines the first part of a tutorial in google features.  Maybe be useful for teaching students and teachers as well.

You should probably remember that Google is busy having a revamp, lots of it’s bits and pieces have recently been modified, deleted and phased out.  Google Labs is on the way out, Timeline and Wonderwheel are gone and plenty more are heading out the door.

More from the Australian Listserv today – Google Search Evangalism

And I know that you all know that Google owns YouTube and here is the Google Channel on YouTube.

 

Judy O’Connell showing, telling and teaching

One of the absolute best things about the SLANZA conference for me was the chance to meet Judy O’Connell.  I’ve been following her writing on her blog Hey Jude for a long long time and night after night I watch with amazement as she shares links galore on Twitter and now she is actively posting on the SLANZA Facebook page.  I like her take on the world, the way she shows practical ways of using the web 2.0  technology she is keen on.  I like the fact that she is an Australian Teacher Librarian who has worked in school libraries for a long time and who is fully aware of the environment we work in, the challenges we face and she likes practical solutions to everyday problems, and best of all she likes to share her knowledge.  She now works as a Lecturer at Charles Sturt University and is training today’s students to be tomorrows education leaders.

Judy loves technology and she loves sharing technology and I love people like that.  I was really lucky to get to ‘play’ with Judy during one of the workshop sessions (Who? Wagging? Me? Never!) and that was time really valuably spent and I learnt such a lot in that time it was just staggering.  From impromptu sessions around Judy’s iPad outside the auditorium with a bunch of fellow conference goers, to her fantastic lightening speed workshop Judy shared so much information and ‘stuff you can use’ in a very short three days that my brain is still spinning.

Below is a link to the google doc that Catherine Lee and I typed in tandem (Yay for Google docs) while we sat in the workshop (Miriam did the tweeting).  If you couldn’t get to conference we really hope that the doc gives you an in to the feel of the workshop and that you can use some of the things in there.  Click here to go to the document.  As it states in the document everything is available in the Livebinder.  There is so much in there that it will take me a long time to work through it all, I keep finding new treasures.

A Google a day

Well this is fun.  Just had a little play with this and found it a great way of stretching your brain and testing your search skills.  A Google a day gives you new challenges every day.  It works like this:  They ask a question, you find the answer, they tell you if you are right or wrong, you try again, or if you got it right you get a new question.  Repeat at will.

Great stuff for students, great for the 5 mins at the end of the period when you need a filler, great as a challenge for all sorts of people, including me.  And you can embed it on your blog.   Love it.

Your stats are showing!

via David Lee King’s blog

Their Summer Reading programme sign-up stats screen appears on all the public computers at TSCPL, updated each week with the latest figures. Now, setting aside the fact that we’re in the grips of the mildest winter ever, I reckon this could be adapted to show all sorts of interesting stats for your school library. Imagine it showing the number of books issued by genre (my current obsession – more on that in a future post), or maybe a Boy Vs Girl battle…

1. Grab yourself a cool background – find one or make one yourself
2. Add your title and any decorative bits and pieces you want (got stickers?)
3. Add the stats boxes – the actual size doesn’t matter as long as you have your ratios about right, I reckon
4. Share it! If you’ve got a display screen, bung it on there. If you have OPAC machines, make it the screen-saver.
   You could even – shock, horror! – make a paper version for the display wall outside your library!

Here’s my 5 minute test version made using a Google docs Drawing – why don’t you give it a try?

Google image sorting

Google has a new feature for sorting images while searching for specific images.  Watch the video below and you will get the picture.

Came to me via Core Education’s Facebook Page