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Five Search Tips to make your life easier...

 

[A version of this article appeard in Issue 2.3 of Teach Secondary Magazine - April 2013]

 

Even though being able to search the web these days might seem like such a basic and normal skill it is funny that there are still lots of people (both young people and adults) who do it really badly. By learning a few basic tips to improve your efficiency when searching the web will not only save you some time but also it will help you discover powerful resources that can be used with your students.

Have a go at trying some of these things…

 

1. Search by File Type

By searching by ‘file type’ using the Google Advanced Search Menu (www.google.com) you can discover a whole heap of resources that have got instant practical application in the classroom and automatically filter out content that is likely to not be as relevant. You can access the advanced search function by using the ‘cog’ menu on your search screen.

For example the search term below will just return PowerPoint files for Rainforests. This is a great way to get ideas or a starting point for your own multi media presentations.

 

2. Advanced Image Search

There is nothing more frustrating than an image in a presentation that is pixilated. So when searching for images online first make sure that it is going to be of a high resolution and also make sure that as far as you know you have permission to use it. Google’s Advanced Image Search (www.google.com) is great tool for this. In Image search mode you can open up the Advanced Search Menu by using the settings ‘cog’ on the right hand side of the screen.

From here you can specific all sorts of things about the image you want returned. For example, its size (the bigger the better for an on-screen presentation), its file type (.jpgs work well) and its usage rights (free to use or share – is good for school use).

 

3. Search videos by source and location

With all the on-line video that is now available online (on YouTube and other video sharing sites) gone are the days of having to set your VHS recorder to gather resources to show your students. The problem is there is so much video to choose from it is difficult to find clips of the right length. Also YouTube is still blocked in some schools but there are other sites (like the BBC), which are normally unblocked. Bing Video Search (www.bing.com) could be your answer here you can search by content, video length (eg: under 5 mins) and source.

 

4. Use Visual Search for Project based Learning

Of course a web search is only as good as the terms that you put in. If you really want to get your students to understand and think about search and search terms you might consider a visual search engine such as Quintura (www.quintura.com)  Visual search allows you to see the other popular search terms associated with the term that you are searching for.

For example, you search for ‘rainforests’ but because this is such a big topic you might actually mean ‘rainforest destruction’ or ‘rainforest destruction animals’. Visual Search is particularly useful for project based work.

 

5. Use a specialist search engine to find specialist things

It sounds like comment sense doesn’t it? But people often forget that there are lots of specialist search engines for specialist things. For example if you are working with A-Level Students on academic work try using Google Scholar (www.scholar.google.com) which searches scholarly literature and articles) or if you are working with Year 7 pupils you might consider using Kid Rex (www.kidrex.com), which is a more child friendly search engine. Similarly, if you want to search inside or find a book Google Book Search (www.google.com/books) is a good place to start. Finally, if you are looking for something completely different – check out Dog Pile! (www.dogpile.com).

To take you further

If you enjoyed these tips – you should consider checking out Google’s Inside Search Centre for lots more ideas and advice www.google.com/insidesearch. All of the other search engines mentioned in this article are listed in the links box below.

[A version of this article appeard in Issue 2.3 of Teach Secondary Magazine - April 2013]

 

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Impressive Speech Recognition Breakthrough from Microsoft Research [YouTube Clip]

In June 2010 I wrote a successful series of posts titled “Technologies that will change how we live, work, play and learn”. Even though my thoughts on this are now two years out-of-date I still think many of my observations at the time hold true.

One of my predictions was around on-line translation tools and I’ve really seen these improve in leaps and bounds since June 2010. I spent two weeks working in Eastern Europe over the October holidays (Albania, Romania and Bulgaria) and if it wasn’t for Google Translate and Bing Translator I would have really struggled to transfer the learning to the teachers I was working with.

The following YouTube clip from Microsoft Research is a really interesting step forward in real-time translation. Although it is still not 100% perfect what is interesting about it is that firstly, it is pretty good and secondly not only can it have a pretty good go at translating the spoken word into Mandarin Chinese but when it does it, it sounds like you!

The video gets off to a slow start, but if your interested in this sort of thing it is definatly worth a watch.

 

New Technology and Outdoor Learning (5 of 8): Activities with purpose - Open Street Map and Microsoft Photosynth

This is the fifth of eight posts where I discuss some of the things that I talked about at the 2010 Learning and Teaching Scotland Outdoor learning Regional Events.

I think that all outdoor learning should have a purpose otherwise it is just ‘outdoor’ (isn’t it?). During my presentation at the Learning and Teaching Scotland Outdoor Learning Regional Events I talked a lot about purpose including:

• Learning new skills and reflecting on what you have learnt
• Overcoming physical challenge and understanding progression
• Facing your fears and sharing this with others
• Collecting scientific data and publishing your results to a wide audience
• To complete a national accreditation award eg: John Muir or Duke of Edinburgh Award
• Geocashing

I also talked in detail about two other technologies that could add purpose to outdoor journeys.

These were:

1) Open Street Map

OpenStreetMap (OSM) is a collaborative project to create a free editable map of the world. Maps are created using data from portable GPS devices, aerial photography, other free sources or simply from local knowledge. Both rendered images and the vector graphics are available for download under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 license.

Again, children gathering real data to support global collaboration projects like this provides real purpose for students work. One of the most impressive up-dates of OpenStreetMap ever was after the Hati earthquake.

Globally, after the earthquake, hundreds of people collaborated to produce a map of the island using satellite imagery that could then be used by the rescue services. Just have a look at the video below.

OpenStreetMap - Project Haiti from ItoWorld on Vimeo.

2) Microsoft Photosynth

Photosynth is a software application from Microsoft that analyzes digital photographs and generates a three-dimensional model of the photos. Its great for outdoor learning because lots of children can take a picture of a landscape or feature and then when you get back to class the software can turn it into a 3D object.

For example all of these photographs below of the view of the River Clyde....

Become a stiched 3D panorama (Silverlight plugin required):

This can be used to develop collaboration (eg: combining childrens photographs when you get back to school), the objects can also be used for reflective purposes and you can even geo-locate photosynths in Bing Maps to give real audience for students work.

New Technology and Outdoor Learning (4 of 8): 4 of 8: Bing Maps and Google Earth

This is number four of eight posts where I discuss some of the things that I talked about at the 2010 Learning and Teaching Scotland Outdoor learning Regional Events

Bing Maps and Google Earth have a massive amount of potential to compliment and develop the outdoor learning experience.

I’m not saying that we should be using virtual worlds like these replace children going outside. Quite the opposite, I am saying that we should use free resources like this to compliment the outdoor experience.

There are lots of examples of how these two resources can be used but the ones I mentioned during the Learning and Teaching Scotland Outdoor Learning Regional Events were:

1) Use the real time weather layer in Google Earth of Bing Map Weather App to help encourage children to forecast the weather but also to plan with the children in the build up to your outdoor learning experience.




2) Use the Google Earth Webcam layer or the Bing Maps Webcam App to visit places in advance of your fieldtrip. Or use these layers to visit a place that you are unlikely to be able to visit with a class (eg: Antarctica) and then compare them to a local area that you have visited.



3) Use the Google Earth Ruler tools to measure distance, scale and orientation. Compare what you measure virtually to something that you have really measured in real life. In the UK Farm field size is a great example of this. Get the children to use Google Earth to measure the field sizes in different countries (eg: they are normally quite surprised when they measure the fields of southern Alberta in Canada) and then in small groups go out and measure a field near the school. Just think about what you can do with all this data.



4) You can also use Google Earth and Bing Maps to show an area that you are going to visit to parents before you actually take a group of children there. I recently did this with the parents of the young people that I am taking to Alaska this summer. An equally valuable use of this type of resource is to virtually visit these places after your outdoor experience to help children reflect on their experience and their learning.

5) Finally, along the same sort of theme it is great to use tools like the Bing World Wide Telescope App to compare the stars in the sky that you have seen to the stars in the sky in a different part of the world.

Here is a topical example:

i) Pick a place on the earth

ii) See what the stars would look like above your head and explore the sky

Technologies that will change how we live, work, play and learn (3 of 5): On-line translator tools

This is a third of five posts where I will talk about some technologies that may change how we live, work and play. They are personal opinion and I could very well be wrong. I mention them sometimes in conference presentations and workshops and wanted to describe my thinking more in this series of short posts.

The third technology that I think will change how we live, work, play and learn is on-line translator tools. I first talked about this in my keynote at the Aberdeenshire Glow Champion Event in May 2010. Let me explain my thinking.

Do you recognize this?

It’s a babel fish. You might remember it from the Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy (I still think the original BBC radio show was best…. but I digress!). The babel fish was a fish that you could put into your ear and then when people spoke to you in a different language the fish would translate what ever they said into English (or your first language).

Anyway, software has been around for years that claims to translate between languages. But Google translate is a good example of a piece of free web based software that actually works and it works really well.

For example this is a screenshot of the Microsoft France website:


This is what it looks like when you run it though Google Translate:

It is almost 100% accurate. Now you might be thinking that Microsoft would just re-direct to their UK version of the page. So, I tried it again with an article on Julien Llanas blog that I was interested in reading (but it was in French).

The original article is here:

And the translated article is here:




Now I know that neither of the translations are perfect but they are good enough and they certainly make the text accessible to me as a non-French speaker (and reader!). It is not just Google who have on-line translator tools Bing Translate from Microsoft is also really good!

So where am I going with this? Well Google translate can translate English into 56 other languages (and this number continues to grow). The accuracy of the translations varies depending on the language but I would say that they are all at least 60% accurate. There will be some people that say that, ‘they are only 60% accurate’ but I would say that is still 60% of 56 languages that I couldn’t read or write before… It really is amazing when you think about it – what a tool!

But it doesn’t just stop there. What if you are in a restaurant in Germany and you want to find out what something is on the menu? Well from reading the above we know that you could type it into Google Translate but that takes a bit of time. If you had an Android powered phone you can take a picture of the menu and then using the Google Goggles App select the text on the photograph that you want to translate and Google will do the rest. It is very impressive and very quick.

Of course, if you read the second post in this series on voice input to text for the mobile you will already be thinking about what comes next.

We have the capacity to speak into a mobile device and for it to turn that into text, we have the capacity to turn the text into a near translation of (currently) 56 different languages, we have had screen reader software for years. How long will it be before I can speak into my mobile in English and you can listen to me in French?

The answer is not long. In fact you can already do it (see video from Microsoft Research Asia below) – its just a bit slow and not as accurate as it could be just yet. But, as I have tried to emphasize throughout this series the technology will get smaller, quicker and cheaper. The important thing about the technology is that as soon as it does become available and robust (6 – 18 months) everyone with a smart phone will have access to it for free.

What’s my point? Well first of all I am not trying to suggest that this will be the end to modern languages teaching in school. I still think there is a place for this and I still think that children should be given the opportunity to learn a different language if they want to. I am sure that some modern language teachers and other educators will agree on this point.

But what I do think we need to be thinking about is how will we explain to children that learning a second language is important? How will we motivate them when they can just pick up their phone and translate their own spoken word into a number of different languages? When does this technology become part of a business education or enterprise course?

Importantly, at what point will we start to use these wonderful tools in school to help get children and young people to not just learn another language but to learn about each other? At what point will we realize that conversation can reduce conflict for future generations and that language is currently a barrier to these important conversations, these important collaborations and probably solving some of the words most difficult problems.

As with the rest of this series – I may well be wrong.

What do you think?

Education Resources to help teach the 2010 Winter Olympics (11 of 10!): Bing and Google Home Page Lesson Starter

OK, I know that when I started out with this series of blog posts I was just going to post 10 lesson ideas that could be used teach the Winter Olympics. But I thought I would just flag up this old favorite of mine. Using the Microsoft Bing Starter Page.

The great thing about the Microsoft Bing start page is that every day you have a new powerful image that can be used as a basis for a classroom discussion. At the moment all of the images are to do with the Olympics - yesterday for example was snowboarding.

 

The other nice thing about the Microsoft Bing Start Page is that it always has at least three 'hot spots' hidden within it that either asks questions about the photograph (creating a simple interactive mystery) or linking to other trusted content that will tell you more about the image or place. One of the hot-spots from today's image is shown below.

Off course its not just the Bing home page that has a very strong Olympic theme. the Google Logo over the last few days has also been full of Olympic Winter Sports.

Here is the Google Logo version of snowboarding:

And my personal favorite so far the curling logo:

A nice classroom activity might be to get your class to design their own Google logo but including their favorite Winter Olympic Sport?

Microsoft Bing Maps augmented reality demo at the TED 2010

I was completely blown away when I watched this short 8 minute TED Talk today on their latest evolution of Microsoft Bing Maps which included an Augmented reality demo.

In the words of Bing Maps' Blaise Aguera y Arcas:

"We see this space, three-dimensional environment as being a canvas on which all sorts of applications can play out. Maps, directions are really just one of them."

Very impressive stuff - can't wait to check it out in more detail. TED video embedded below: