Thing 12 - The Wonderful World of Google

I'm fairly certain everyone in our class and nearly everyone else in the world who has Internet access has used Google at some point in their lives. A great majority of that usage was probably spent looking up information that falls somewhere between fascinating and utterly pointless. I know my searches fall near both sides of that range. Anyway, Google has more to offer than an easy way to look up information. Two of the Google tools I chose to explore further were Google Calendar and Google Translate.

I had never used Google Calendar before today. In fact I don't think I've used a calendar or planner of any kind since I left high school so apparently I am an organizational mess. It was fairly simple to use so I decided to create a schedule of my obligations for the week of 10/14-10/20. In the future as I have more meetings, conferences, and various other events to attend I can see it becoming necessary to use something like Google Calendar on a daily basis in order to keep track of everything going on. I like the feature where you can chose to send email or text message alerts even up to 10 minutes before the event, although that seems to be cutting it pretty close at that point.

Next I spent a few minutes messing around with Google Translate. I decided to "borrow" an idea I saw from  The Brennan Breeze blog and translate my blog post in a different language. I decided to translate it into Icelandic because its alphabet looks somewhat similar to ours, but its arrangement makes it look nearly indecipherable when comparing it to the English we use. In the future this could be potentially helpful if there is an English Language Learner in the classroom, and then we could have some accommodations for words that he/she may still be learning in English. On a lighter note, I also gave it some thought about how it could be used as a potential April Fools joke to have an entire lesson written out in a different language. It may not be fully formed yet, but I still have a couple years to figure it out...

My Google Calendar

My Google Translate