Instructify

BY KEVIN HODGSON

Google started it, but other sites are running with the idea of creating a search engine built around reading levels. Twurdy (a mash-up of “too wordy”) is one of the easiest and most user-friendly sites that I have come across for searching and finding information on the web based on the concept of “readiblity.” The site, which is built on the back of Google Search, conveniently color-codes the various reading levels, and a quick click of a button allows you to match up approximate age levels with reading levels.

There are three settings that you can choose: Just Twurdy, which searches using Twurdy’s basic algorithm with medium speed and medium results; Simple Twurdy, which searches using Twurdy’s simple algorithm for fast speed but less accurate results; and Twurdy with Pop, which searches using Twurdy’s most complex algorithm which includes looking up the popularity of words within the text. It has a slower speed, but a higher level of accuracy.

For students, this means that a quick search on a topic yields web resources that are at their reading levels — I did one on the Galapagos Islands and the site was very useful. For teachers, it means that gathering resources appropriate to students’ reading levels might get a bit easier. An interesting experiment, too, is to put in the URL of a website and see what reading level is assigned to it. I did this with my own blog and it was fascinating to see the blog posts broken down by reading levels.

One drawback is that I wanted to be able to better narrow my original search field to just specific age levels (such as, all of the websites about the Galapagos Islands for a 10-year-old reading level). But overall, Twurdy was a satisfying experience and one worth considering for the classroom.

Twurdy

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BY DAN FROELICH

With the ever-increasing adoption of smart phones in today’s electronics market, we find ourselves trusting these tiny devices with usernames, passwords, credit card numbers, and personal data. What happens when this valuable gadget is misplaced? We panic! While many smartphone owners have an iOS device such as the latest iPhone, many more are choosing to adopt an Android device. Even though the specifications vary greatly, the spirit of the Open Handset Alliance lives somewhere deep within each device. Despite phone insurance, password patterns and PINs, we are likely to misplace our mobile device at some point during our two year contract.

So when you misplace your handset, AND YOU WILL, I have a great solution to ease your worries (unless you dropped your phone in the Atlantic Ocean). Where’s My Droid is a free application available through the Android Marketplace that helps you find find your lost phone. If you have a QR code reader, you can scan the code pictured at the top right and get a head start.

So why would I want to download this application? Where’s My Droid allows you to send a pre-determined text message to your Android phone that will activate the ringer for a previously decided upon length of time. Additionally, if some ne’er-do-well has your phone you can send a separate message that will activate your handset’s GPS and return a Google map and GPS coordinates of where your phone is.

I installed Where’s My Droid (I had to jump into the Marketplace and dig through the four possible entries that were listed under the same name) and tested it out in my home, while my mobile device was still in my own possession (as I recommend everyone do). It worked flawlessly. I used my Google Voice account to send a text message to my mobile number and received the messages you see here.

Is this application perfect? Probably not. But it certainly is a great option if you don’t have some enterprise level of security on your device. There are many other options available as you set up the default behaviors, many of these applications even offer a remote wipe option to clear all sensitive data from your mobile phone. If you have an Android device, make sure that this is in your top five applications when setting up your applications.

Where’s My Droid

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BY AARON FOWLES

July 27 is the UN’s Holocaust Remembrance Day. Google has partnered with Yad Vashem to further digitize and index its extensive archive of Holocaust photographs and documents.

The archive, which contains almost 14,000 items, is a visual journey through the Holocaust, showing authentic pictures of life in the ghettos, extermination camps, and postwar reconstructions and memorial services.

Clearly, this is a powerful collection of imagery that can be leveraged in the teaching of WWII history.  Some of the photos are extremely graphic, so I wouldn’t suggest letting younger students explore the site freely.  Each photo is accompanied by a short description, which should allow students to contextualize what they are looking at.

Moving forward, Google’s plans are to deploy their optical character recognition software on the archives, which will make searching for documents from family members much easier. Enter in a name, and you’ll be presented with an assortment of materials connected with that person. The possibilities for research are endless.

Yad Vashem

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BY CHRISTOPHER PANNA

Gone are the days when teachers have to rely on the limited selection of paper-bound “readers” for supplementary material like primary documents or scholarly articles. There’s a plethora of sources on the web, and Google’s specialized searches make it easier than ever to find what you want.

If you’re looking for past news articles, Google News Timeline provides a fun and intuitive way to search. Simply enter a year, month, and even day to see news articles published on that date. You can then refine your search by entering a subject and clicking “add more queries” to select a type of media like newspapers or magazines. The best thing about News Timeline, however, is the easy-to-use display that arranges the results chronologically. The example above is the result of searching Time Magazine exactly 30 years ago. Clicking an issue took me to Time’s page where the full articles were available. Using News Timeline I’ve found articles as far back as the early 1800s, and in some ways the older ones are the best because you get an image of the original print!

Another source for high-quality readings is Google Scholar. It searches publications like academic journals, public domain books, and court opinions. The options give you the same ability as News Timeline to refine your search by subject, author, and date. For some of the results, only an abstract is available, but for many you can read the full text. My Scholar search for works about Emily Dickinson published since 2000 yielded an entire book of academic reviews and several journal abstracts.

These search engines can open more options for you and your students as alternatives to textbook readings. Historical articles from News Timeline can give a perspective from a different time period, while Scholar can ensure that you keep up with recent developments.

Google News Timeline

Google Scholar

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BY KEVIN HODGSON

Google Docs just got a bit more interesting, as you can now upload and share videos in Google Docs as well as documents, spreadsheets and drawings. It’s easy enough to do — just click “upload,” as if you were uploading a document, and the video goes into your Docs Home. There are some limits (no videos larger than 1 GB for example) but the addition of video allows a user to create folders on topics with all sorts of media.

So why host a video on Google Docs instead of YouTube? For teachers, it is an issue of access and privacy (you can share the link to your Google Doc with a select group of people or make it public or invite collaborators into the video file) and organization along subject areas (the Google Doc folder system). As with other platforms in Google Docs, you can toggle between various versions of your uploaded videos. Plus, if students are working on a video project together, Google Docs might be a more secure way of sharing video segments and final projects.

One thing you don’t seem to be able to do is to embed the video in other websites, so if that is your aim for video, then you may want to use Youtube or Vimeo or some other video-hosting service that is out there.

These are the video files you can upload into Google Docs:

• WebM files (Vp8 video codec and Vorbis Audio codec)
• .MPEG4, 3GPP and MOV files – (h264 and mpeg4 video codecs and AAC audio codec)
• .AVI (many cameras use this format – typically the video codec is MJPEG and audio is PCM)
• .MPEGPS (MPEG2 video codec and MP2 audio)
• .WMV
• .FLV (Adobe – FLV1 video codec, MP3 audio)

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BY BILL FERRIS

Middle and high school students can win scholarships, internships, prizes, and a trip to the Googleplex in California via the Google Science Fair.

Google has partnered with NASA, CERN, LEGO, National Geographic, and Scientific American to put its science fair together. The competition is open to individuals or teams of up to three students aged 13-18, from anywhere in the world. Like most Google endeavors, it’s free to participate.

If you’re intrigued, sign up to receive more information directly from Google, along with stickers, bookmarks, and posters. Detailed information has yet to be released, but entries will be submitted online, and must be received by April 4, 2011.

Google Science Fair

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BY KEVIN HODGSON

We all know that parents and families are part of any learning equation, so Google has launched a fun site to bring parents up to speed on some basic technology tasks. Teach Parents Tech care packages are aimed at students who want to help their adult parents learn such skills as taking a screenshot, adjusting time on your computer clock, copying and pasting text, and resizing photos, but this site could easily be a neat “present” for parents from their children. The categories deal with media, the basics, using the Web, finding information, and communication.

Google certainly gives the site a playful look, as it is set up as an email form letter. The tongue-in-cheek format also allows the sender to show how impressed they are, or how worried they are, about the technological skills of the receiver of the message. Each “care package” message comes complete with a (Google-created) video tutorial on the topic that was chosen. Of course, this is Google and all of the videos has a Googlized tint to them.

Teach Parents Tech care packages

BY BILL FERRIS

Google’s advanced search function lets you filter search results by reading level. Simply click the “Advanced Search” link next to the search bar on the Google home page (or directly underneath the search box on any search results page). In the “Need more tools?” section, you can tell Google to only return results within your reading level of choice (basic, intermediate, or advanced). Google will also give you a graph that breaks down the percentage of results that fall into each reading level.

This is a handy tool for elementary students. It’s also useful for folks who want to research a super-advanced topic they know nothing about, and want to find resources written in plain English.

How it works:

“The feature is based primarily on statistical models we built with the help of teachers. We paid teachers to classify pages for different reading levels, and then took their classifications to build a statistical model. With this model, we can compare the words on any webpage with the words in the model to classify reading levels. We also use data from Google Scholar, since most of the articles in Scholar are advanced.”

Since language isn’t always compatible with statistical models, you’ll want to use your own judgment when determining the reading levels of the results you get. Still, filtering by reading level may be a good way to make sure you and your students get the search results that are most helpful to you.

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BY JASON DON FORSYTHE

Google Maps Mania is a blog that highlights the different ways Google Maps and Google Earth mashups are trending, and the educational value that they have. What is a mashup you say? It’s when you take one geographical element and superimpose or put it side by side with another. For example, if you wanted to see how big the Great Wall of China would stretch if it has been started in Slovakia, there’s a map for that.

Many students’ conceptions of spatial relations when it comes to geography is sorely lacking — outside of what they know locally, it’s hard to conceptualize how big other parts of the planet are in comparison. This is where mashup maps really can open students’ eyes to the vastness of the world they live in. The comparison angle is just one way Google Maps are being used, however. Google Maps Mania is a treasure trove of different types of projects and ideas for schools to use cartography.

Google Maps Mania

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BY KEVIN HODGSON

Tom Barrett has turned collaboration and sharing among teachers into an art form, and the results of these collaborations is a series of Google Presentations that can provide valuable insight into a wealth of possible technology tools for the classroom.

Tom (whose blog at EDTE.CH is worth a visit or two) has been exploring the possibility of iPods, Wallwisher, pocket video cameras, Twitter, Google Earth, Prezi and more as potential learning opportunities for students.

The real power comes when he asks teachers with ideas and experience to add to his presentations through the collaborative nature of Google Presentations. The result is a list of ever-growing resources that tap into a wide range of topics and levels of entry with a wide array of teaching voices.

Tom Barrett’s Interesting Ways to…

• Get to Know Your New Class
• Ideas for Class Blog Posts
• Use a Learning Platform in the Classroom
• Support Spelling in the Classroom
• Teach Reading Comprehension in the Classroom
• Use Web Conferencing in the Classroom
• Make Your Classroom a Sparkly Place to Learn
• Use Audio in Your Classroom
• Use Wallwisher in the Classroom
• Support Writing in the Classroom
• Use an iPod Touch in the Classroom
• Nintendo Wii in the Classroom
• Use a Wiki in the Classroom
• Use a Visualizer in the Classroom
• Use Twitter in the Classroom
• Use Wordle in the Classroom
• Use Your Pocket Video Camera in the Classroom
• Use Google Docs in the Classroom
• Use Google Earth in the Classroom
• Use a Nintendo DS in the Classroom
• Use Search Engines in the Classroom
• Use Your Interactive Whiteboard in the Classroom
• Prezi in the Classroom
• Use Voicethread in the Classroom
• Use the iPad in the Classroom
• Use Google Search in the Classroom
• Use Google Maps in the Classroom

BY KEVIN HODGSON

It’s that time of year. Wash your hands. Use that disinfectant wipe on the students’ desks. Stay home if you’re sneezing a bit too much. The flu season is almost upon us, and what better way to feed your fears of the flu than to watch it slowly make its way across the planet? Google Flu Trends is one such site that tracks the flu across the globe, although it does it in an unusual way: it uses data from search queries to track where the flu is most intense.

As Google notes:

“We have found a close relationship between how many people search for flu-related topics and how many people actually have flu symptoms. Of ccourse, not every person who searches for “flu” is actually sick, but a pattern emerges when all the flu-related search queries are added together. We compared our query counts with traditional flu surveillance systems and found that many search queries tend to be popular exactly when flu season is happening. By counting how often we see these search queries, we can estimate how much flu is circulating in different countries and regions around the world.”

The site provides the user with a map, and as you hover over regions of the world, the map tells you of the level of danger related to the flu outbreaks. I was happy to know that my part of the world is on the “low” level of flu threat. Now, anyway. I’ll be back in a month to check it out again.

In the classroom

Along with interest in how sickness spreads on a global scale, this use of data via search queries provides an interesting example of how scientists and mathematicians are really making an impact on how we view and interpret the world around us. It also shows how correlations between disparate sets of information can be useful, if looked at from a different lens. No doubt, Google Flu Trends began because some Google engineer wondered if there was a correlation between people searching about the flu and the outbreak of the flu.

Google Flu Trends

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Instructify has frequently written about the educational uses of Google Earth, here and here, for example. Fortunately, it’s such a good tool that another post won’t be overkill. The Earth and Space Science QUEST site, created by undergrad students at Penn State Brandywine, includes a collection of lessons that utilize Google Earth.

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BY MARK SAMBERG

Maybe it’s just my imagination, but I’ve seen a lot of posts in the blogosphere recently about classroom responder services (such as PollEverywhere and PollDaddy). These tools provide a lot of value in the classroom, but there are a few big things they can’t do. While they can ask a question and get an answer, they can’t facilitate a discussion about the question. A solution has arisen from the depths of Google Labs, Google Moderator.

Google Moderator allows for discussion around a single topic. Designed for meetings, this tool facilitates real-time feedback in meetings (like classrooms), or crowdsourcing the development of new ideas.

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BY KEVIN HODGSON

I am a big fan of Google Docs for collaborative writing, for storing my documents in the cloud, and for sharing documents, slide shows, spreadsheets, drawings and more. Having documents available through any internet connection is really convenient for me. If you are someone who wonders what Google Docs is all about, Google has just launched a Google Docs Demo Site that allows you to create a document, spreadsheet or drawing without registering for an account (you will need a Google Account to save Google Docs long-term, though).

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BY BILL FERRIS

Everyone knows nuclear weapons are deadly. Ground Zero makes the destruction hit home, semi-literally.

This Google Maps mashup lets you see what would happen to your hometown (or another location of your choosing) if it was hit by various nuclear weapons. Pick your poison, which ranges from Fat Man and Little Boy to the Soviet Tsar Bomba, which caused the largest explosion ever. You can even look at the impact of the asteroid that killed the dinosaurs, proving that man is still no match for nature. (more…)