8 Google Tricks For Your Classroom

Post date: Oct 18, 2011 8:58:21 PM

From SimpleK12®

Written by Lisa November 11, 2010

By now we all know about Google Search and Google Docs... but here are 8 specific tricks you can use with Google to enhance your classrooms. I could easily have created a list of 100+ ways to use Google...but for now, let's stick with these 8 tricks you may not have known about already.

1. Converting Units - Need to convert miles to centimeters? Teaspoons to Tablespoons? Dollars to Euros? Simple type in the known unity and the unknown unit to find the answer. Click here to see how many centimeters are in 2 miles.

2. Searching within A website - You can use the power of Google search to search for a specific term on any website. For example, if you wanted to find information about Wordle on the SimpleK12 website, you would type in "site:SimpleK12.com Wordle" <--- click to see results!

3. Time - To find out what time it is in another part of the world, time in "what time is it LOCATION". Find out what time it is in Japan.

4. Explore the Sky - Use Google Earth Sky feature to look at the night sky from your computer screen. Pretty cool.

5. Search Scholarly Works - You and your students can receive search results from scholarly literature using Google Scholar. A great way to get content from peer-reviewed papers, theses, academic publishers, articles, journals and more.

6. Connect Globally - Google Chat helps you connect through video to others around the world. Image connecting your classroom with students in another country, or finding an author, business leader, or politician to chat with your class!

7. Study Price Comparisons - Have you heard of Google Product Search? Compares lots of different products for comparison shopping. Need a new book bag?

8. Find Specific Documents - Say you want to find a PowerPoint Presentation on the Civil War. By using "filetype:ppt" in your search term, you can return results that are only PowerPoint files. Check out all of these Civil War PowerPoints. This works for multiple file types.