Thing #21

Google, google, google! Who knew that you could do so much through google? When I was growing up, I first heard the word "google" from my brother. He had learned it in math class and it meant "the largest number". He was always going around saying that he was going to be a "multi-google-aire" when he grew up. Well, that never happened, but the concept of google certainly did become a huge part of our everyday lives.

Some of these things, I had seen and even used before but never really considered that they were a part of google. Picasa Web albums, for example. I had heard of it but didn't know it was connected to google in any way. I think that Picasa and Flickr will be two of the applications that I will end up using the most from this experience.

Of course, I have used google maps before and my husband has loved google earth ever since it came out! He spent hours on it looking up all kinds of places. He was just fascinated with it.
Today, the ones that I chose to explore were the blog search (where you can type in a subject and find blogs relating to that topic), knol (basically blogs where you can write about subjects you know a lot about), google sketchup (where you can create and share 3-D models), and in the google labs I looked at City Tours and Similar Images. I was interested in google notebook, but it had been discontinued to new users. I also played around with the calendar and actually created a personal calendar for myself. That was very cool. I think that might be a good thing to share amonst a grade level where all the teachers of a grade level can add things onto the calendar. This would make it easier to remember upcoming events for newsletters, etc.

The knol and similar images were the most interesting to me. As I have gone through this course and we have had to find various blogs of interest, I have had a lot of trouble finding things that I relate to. I can see how this application would weed out the ones I am looking for so much easier. You just type in your subject and it pulls up all the blogs that relate to that subject. This would be so helpful in the classroom when trying to find information on a subject.

Similar images finds pictures that are similar to the ones you are looking at. It is very similar to just doing a search on flickr, but it would probably include more possibilities because it pulls up things that are similar in lots of ways.

I will be using lots of these google tools in my professional and personal life now that I know about them.