Thing #6: Google Tools

Google Scholar: I need to stay current on new developments in health and medicine. I do not need the frequent updates of Google alerts, but I do need good quality information. I tried searching a topic with google scholar. This is a much more efficient way to find scientific studies. It weeds out the commercial and irrelevant sites. This is a tool I will use that will improve my knowledge and therefore the quality of my teaching. 

Google Documents: This will be a useful tool for collaborating with colleagues on other campuses. We are in the same department, we teach the same course, we are the only one teaching the course at our schools, but we rarely get to see each other. I will suggest that we use this tool to increase collaboration on developing new lessons.

I will also try this a student group project on researching health occupations. I tried a group online research project a few years ago. It was not successful. Students prepared documents, and emailed them to me for coordination and posting. We had problems with incompatible formats, and problems with email getting past the SBISD spam filter. I had concerns about copyright violations and fair usage. I think using google documents will allow students to more easily access and share documents, creating a useful product in a controlled environment.

Thing #6: Mashups and 3rd Party Sites

It has taken me a while to get to the mashups activity because I have been busy helping my daughter find a place to live when she starts school. Now I discover that by researching real estate on sites that show addresses, pictures, and locations, I have been using a mashup. These are very useful applications.

The flickr color picker flower application was fun. The Big Huge Labs custom jigsaw application is potentially much more useful for my classes. If I can find the right images, avoiding copyright violations, I can have anatomy review activities created. This would be much more fun than just another review worksheet.