Google mania has begun in my head!  Who knew there were sooo many cool tricks within this monster of a search engine/website/social network.  I want to know all of the bells and whistles well so I can be super-effective with my time and in my teaching.  With that said, I realize if I can learn and incorporate a few things into my working knowledge each week, I will be gaining.  And, I know where to come back to learn and incorporate more later!

The features that gave me the AHA! moments this week were many...learning how to search was eye-opening!  There are so many ways that Google has made this feature user-friendly!  With the know-how, the information one can glean is unlimited!  With just a few words, it is possible to have information concerning movies, weather, sports scores, restaurants serving a favorite type of food-unbelievable! Also, searching for a certain file type will be very useful when it comes to create lesson plans or presentations in the classroom.  Google books searches,searching by reading level and narrowing down searching to only one site are all easy ways to incorporate technology into my classroom on a daily basis.  To learn how to search in many different ways, click here.here.

Within Google mail, there are some amazing features too.  Chatting with others who are online could be quite helpful to communicate with co-workers who are across the building and schedules never allow time to meet face to face.  Setting up a calendar on Google that allows dates and events to be loaded into the calendar with just a click is an amazing feature to keep all important events in one place.  Creating a custom inbox and prioritizing the emails coming in will also help with time management.  I wanted to sing, "Hallelujah!" when I learned about the undo sent email feature as well as the notification that an email was sent to the wrong person.  Lifesaving features when we get too busy and need someone to have our backs-Google is it!  Here's a video to illustrate many of the amazing features inside Google Mail.

Google is trying to make even the most random of us organized and efficient!