Thing #7

I am woefully behind on this training activity. Who writes and rewrites a blog? Who checks out the precscribed sites and then checks them out again and again? Me.







These comments will be brief. I assumed Google alerts were like the NPR news alerts that I prefer to receive. However, I like the idea that I could enter terms like education or human development and be notified of news relating to those things. I will give that a try. I took the Google calendar off my iGoogle page because I could never figure out to make it work. I have the same problem with the calendar in Outlook. I love my iGoogle page; I have customized it with so many things I like (NPR Topics and Google News, Google Translator, Dictionary, You Tube and Spanish Word A Day). I imagine Picassa is great; I didn't even look. Between my exhautive study of Flickr, ordering pictures on Shutterfly and perusing photos on Mobile Me and Voo, I've had enough photo sharing experiences. Google Scholar seems to be for, as it says, scholarly people. It would not work well for my students. There are too many entries on a page, the print is too small and the materials referenced have high readability levels. I tried entering the term "racial profiling" in both Scholar and Ask kids and the results reinforced my belief that these sites and this topic would provide a frustrating search effort for average and lower level kids. What I did like about Scholar, though, is the fact that power point presentations on a topic like similes are listed.



A final comment about Google search. I came late to surfing the net. Now I can't stop but I rarely use Google. I have always found that the search results on http://www.ask.com/ (formerly, http://www.askjeeves.com/) seem more pertinent to my topic. I am too impatient to go through entry after entry and page after page. And I know my kids are too.