Tammy Worcester!

My school district invited Tammy Worcester to present on our island as a part of our STEM initiative.  She has all of these great Tech Tips that I'm really looking forward to reading further.

Here's the new stuff for me.


Google Search tricks

• Use Google as a calculator.  It even does the correct order of operations. 
• And as a conversion tool.  The key is to use the word "IN".  "As in 100 dollars in euros." 
• And also using the word "Define" in front of any word will pull up the definition.  Sometimes there are pronunciations in there as well. 
• When using Google Chrome, there is a a microphone on the right hand side of the search box.  You can click on this microphone icon to speak your search query. 
• There are also now filtering by reading level if you look on the right for "More Search Tools." 

Blogger tricks. 

• You can e-mail posts to your Blog by setting up this capability under the Settings Tab. This is cool for sending photos from your phone directly to your blog. 
• Adding Audio to your blog.  Vocaroo.com is a Web site that allows you to record your voice and embed it.  Record MP3.org will allow you to link to an audio file.  Vocaroo allows people to embed the audio into the blog.  RecordMP3 links to it. 

Google Docs

• Within Google Docs, you can use the "Research" functionality.  This is in the tools menu.  It puts a left hand bar that allows you to research and cite information directly.  This is interesting and also TERRIBLY SCARY!!! To my mind, I'm happy to see that it will make it even easier for kids to cite sources.  But it also means that they will only be using the free Web to find stuff.   Once they become comfortable with this interface, will they ever be willing to go deeper with resources that are NOT available on the free Web?