Room With A View

Google has a section for Educators. Recently they’ve teamed up with Writing For Teens magazine and created a a series of articles about the writing process and specifically using Google Docs to help promote collaborative writing and editing skills. Though the articles are geared to using Google Docs they’re worthwhile reading/using even if you’re not yet familiar with Google’s on-line word processor. The article titles are:

• With a Little Help From My Friends: The Gifts of a Writing Buddy
• Writing’s Top 10 Tips for Revision
• Collaborative Revision Checklist
• Individual Revision Checklist

Powered by ScribeFire.

Our grade seven students spent three days in Chengde last week. I went along and took along my hand held GPS. I used it to mark the places we went and now they can be loaded into Google Earth. Here are the technical details of how I did it.

As I said above I used my GPS to mark some of the places we went. Next I used GPS Babel to download the waypoints to my computer and convert the file to .gpx format which can be read by Google Earth. Next I dragged and dropped the .gpx file onto an open Google Earth window and voila. I could see everything marked on the map. Finally, I uploaded the file to my class wiki so the kids can access it from home.

It looks like Googlebombing is no longer a problem. This post at Search Engine Watch explains.

The past few days I’ve been listening to podcasts from Alan November’s Building Learning Communities conference. Yesterday I listened to Alan’s session on web literacy and was struck by the concept of Google Bombing. It has huge implications for teaching, and learning. When Google searches it searches for the number of sites that link to a particular website. The more sites that link to a website, the higher up the list the site will appear on a Google search. In essence it’s a popularity contest. People have figured out how to manipulate Google to move their sites higher up the Google ranking and therefore, have more people visit them. This is Google Bombing. It’s possible for a site to bluff its way higher up the Google ranking without deserving to be there. As most people only look at the first page of a search, a lot of good sites will be missed. People need to be aware of how Google searches so they can take necessary precautions. For more on Google Bombing read the BBC article on how George W. Bush was google bombed or Search Engine Watch’s Google’s (and Inktomi’s) Miserable Failure.