Thing #7: Cool Google Tools

I explored this thing several weeks ago. I had already been using Google Earth, and it is one of my favorites. I have used it to explore my neighborhood, city, places I have visited, places I would like to visit. It is a lot of fun, personally educational, but not very relevant to what I teach. 

While working through this thing I discovered Google Scholar. This has been one of the most valuable things I have learned from this course. It provides links to scholarly articles and abstracts, without having to weed through commercial sites. I have already used it to update my knowledge, and get new details to enhance lectures. The depth and detail of many of the articles will be beyond many students, but some students will be able to use this effectively. One problem is that many scholarly journals require subscriptions which SBISD does not provide and are too expensive for me personally. Rice University does allow public access and provides online access to most scholarly journals, so, by using Google Scholar to locate article ahead of time, I can be more efficient when I visit a research library.

Google does offer many other tools, but I have not discovered a personal or academic need for most of them.