Google Power Searching Course

Greetings!

This past fall I took an online course from Google called Power Searching. The course teaches some tips and tricks to searching for material on the internet. Some of what was taught I knew, but I learned a lot of useful information and some things that were just plain cool! I had a great time, learned a lot, and was able to do this somewhat at my own pace. The course lasted for two weeks and the lessons needed to be completed in that time slot. At the end of the course when I completed the coursework, I received a certificate from Google.

Here is some of what I learned in the course.
1. Weather: If you want to know what the weather is somewhere, type “weather Portland, OR” or “weather London” and press ENTER. You will then see the weather for the next 5 days.
2. Calculator: type a calculation and press ENTER. You will see the answer in the results window.
3. Google Images: You can filter the results by using the sidebar information. If you want pictures of red frogs, click on the red square. If you want line drawings to use for a coloring page, you can do this, also.

The whole course was really interesting and took only about 10 – 12 hours. I really learned a lot of stuff and then, because I am a teacher, I wanted to share it with everyone. Plus, it is FREE! Plus, educators in the North Pacific Union Conference can count this for clock hours if you keep track of the time you spend on the course. Plus, you can do it at your own rate. A fun course that is FREE where I can get technology clock hours is worth a few hours of my time and I thought that many of you might feel the same way. And did I mention that it is FREE?!

So here you go. Go to www.powersearchingwithgoogle.com and scroll down a bit. You will see two courses. The top one says “Advanced Power Searching” and the lower one says “Power Searching”.

The Power Searching course is the one that I took in the fall. The lessons were revealed a few at a time during the two week period for the class. For each part of the lesson I watched a short video and completed an activity. Each lesson had multiple videos/activities for different parts of the lesson. Each video was less than 10 minutes and the activities were fun and interesting. I could stop any at any point in the lesson and return later to complete it. There were opportunities to communicate with others taking the course from all over the world. I did not choose to do this. Now the Power Searching course is self paced. There are six lessons and each took me approximately 50 minutes to an hour to complete.

The Advanced course begins on January 23, 2013 and you can sign up to take this class. I would imagine it is similar to the Power Searching course I took. Even though this is ‘timed’ it is still self paced during the two weeks the course lasts.

I hope some of you take advantage of the Google Power Searching course or courses. I showed some of the techniques I learned to our faculty in a staff meeting and got a lot of ‘Ooohs’ and ‘Ahhhs’ which was really fun.

I hope you have a great week.
Audrey