Explorations with other Google Tools

By Wesley Fryer On August 5, 2009 · · 1 Comment

The “In Quotes” feature allows you to find quotes from stories linked to from Google News. These quotations are a valuable resource for understanding where people in the news stand on various issues. Much of the published reporting about people is based on the interpretation of a journalist. Direct quotes, on the other hand, are concrete units of information that describe how newsmakers represent themselves. Google News compiles these quotations from online news stories and sorts them into browsable groups based on who is being quoted….
Compare Quotes allows you to compare quotes from different people in the News about a particular topic. The feature currently allows you to choose and compare quotes from political candidates and other political figures.

Google Moderator

Collaborative Q&A for group events. Google Moderator will help keep discussions on track by allowing users to both suggest questions and vote on others’ questions

[THIS IS REALLY COOL! IT WAS ACTUALLY USED BY THE OBAMA CAMPAIGN TEAM TO SOLICIT QUESTIONS FOR HIM TO RESPOND TO IN CAMAPIGN SPEECHES. MANY OF THESE CAME FROM GOOGLER’S 20% PROJECTS. THIS COULD BE UTILIZED BY SCHOOLS TO SOLICIT INPUT ON HOW TO IMPROVE THE SCHOOL, AND THEN CONSTITUENTS COULD VOTE. I’M THINKING WE

Google Search Wiki is different from the Google Custom Search Engine.

City Tours is in Google Labs which Kern Kelley showed us earlier in the day.

Google Books
– when you do a search on a word, like in the book “Alice in Wonderland,” you can go to the page where that happens, and use the EMBED link code in the upper right corner

Google Translate is very powerful, doesn’t handle idioms well tho (of course)

Picassa: ways it could be used in the classroom
– they give you LOTS of storage
– parents can subscribe to your Picassa feed for the school
– distinguish the client-side Picassa application versus the website
– you can have Picassa scan for people’s faces, and it’s really good (like iPhoto 09 for Mac, but it’s web-based)
– can make an email address that is unique to an album for Picassa, so teachers (or others) can email photos directly to an album
– this is more powerful than Flickr to the extend you can just have an email address that is specific to 1 photo album

Google Mobile works on any Smartphone
– example was a teacher who shared a single google doc to students on a field trip,

Google 411
– doesn’t work on every phone
– can use the 800 number
– if you dial it you can say voice commands, and know where you are based on your location
– won’t do residential, but it will do homes
– Google is harvesting phenomes as people say different words (it is getting more intelligent)
– they are going to be able to build a much better voice activation service

Google Reader
– challenge is helping teachers see the value of RSS
– can make a shared / aggregated feed of different blog posts by creating a new tag for it in your reader, and viewing the public page for it – an RSS feed for that is provided. This is using Google Reader a little like Yahoo Pipes to create a feed river.

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