OTAN News
Many Things Google
Many adult education agencies in California are interested in Google products for use by teachers, students, and staff members in the classroom and office. OTAN provides a number of Google-related trainings throughout the school year at adult ed sites and conferences; in fact, OTAN, in partnership with the California Adult Education Program Technical Assistance Project (CAEP TAP) and the Inland Adult Education Consortium, will participate in the second Google Summit for Education this Friday, December 6 at the San Bernardino Valley College. You can learn more about this event by visiting the Google Summit website.
It’s no secret that Google is one of the top tech companies in the world, building on the success of its search feature and the ability to “just Google it” to find answers to so many questions we have. As busy people, though, are we taking advantage of search tips and tricks to quickly find the information we need? There are many articles that you can Google to learn search tips and tricks; here is a list of some to get you started searching better. (And other search engines like Bing, Yahoo, and DuckDuckGo have their own tips and tricks.)
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Use quotation marks to search for an exact phrase – for example, “assessment” or “student voice”
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Use a minus sign to exclude results that contain a particular word – for example, you want to learn about project-based learning but not PBL tech tools, so project-based learning -apps
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Use define: and etymology: to discover the definition and etymology of a word – define:assessment or etymology:assessment
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Use :gov or :edu or :other domain extension to return results with only that domain extension – for example, assessment:gov to retrieve results that only come from government sources
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Use ~ to find synonyms for the word – for example, teacher education ~programs
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Use location: to return results with a specific location
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Use translate … to (another language) to get the translation of a word or phrase into another language
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Use filetype: to find results in that filetype – for example, ppt, doc, xls
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Use * to do a wildcard search – for example, Humpty Dumpty * wall will help identify the missing words
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Use +, -, *, and / to add, subtract, multiply, and divide numbers (for example, 1+1, 1-1, 1*1, and 1/1)
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Enter timer or stopwatch to bring up a timer or stopwatch that can be set or started
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Use convert ... to … to do any type of conversion from one unit of measure to another
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Use … between two numbers to search within a range – for example, 1910...1920 will search the date range between two years
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Use $ in front of a number to search for a price (or price range: $1...$10)
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Use @ or # to do social media searches – for example, #assessment will retrieve Twitter discussions about assessments
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Correct spelling and capitalization don’t really matter – Google will autocorrect misspelled words and return results for names that are not capitalized (washington dc)
Learn handy search tips and tricks to save time and become a smarter searcher! And contact OTAN if you would like to have a Google-related training at your WIOA-funded agency!
Article: 25 Simple Google Search Tips For Teachers from TeachThought
Article: 37 Advanced Google Search Tips for Smarter Searching from COFORGE