Five Wolfram Alpha Tutorials for Teachers
Yesterday afternoon I published a new video and post on Ed Tech Fitness. The video and post were about using Wolfram Alpha to create personalized estimates of calories burned by doing a variety of activities like hiking, running, swimming, and even playing lawn games. Writing that post on Ed Tech Fitness was the inspiration for […]
Scholar, Books, Datasets, and More – Google Search Tools Students Overlook
In last week’s episode of Two EdTech Guys Take Questions Rushton and I answered a question about alternatives to using Google search. What we failed to emphasize is that Google offers a lot of search tools that students often overlook or don’t even know about. Some of my favorites of those are highlighted and demonstrated […]
Search Tools Your Students (And You?) Are Probably Overlooking
AI search tools like ChatGPT infused into Bing and Google’s Bard are getting a lot of attention right now. But when it’s time to search most students still default to Google.com. Unfortunately, by relying on just Google.com and trendy AI search tools students are missing out on a lot of excellent excellent and helpful material. […]
A Few New Search Tools from Google
Those of you who use Chrome as your primary web browser on your computer or phone, that’s 75% of all readers of FreeTech4Teachers.com according to my Google Analytics account, may notice a few new search tools the next time you update your browser. Yesterday afternoon Google announced new search shortcuts for the Chrome address bar. These […]
Try the Fact Check Explorer
Fact Check Explorer is a free tool from Google that anyone can use to explore the veracity of claims made on the Internet. As you can see in my brief video embedded below, on Fact Check Explorer you can enter a topic or name then see a list of articles accompanied by notations about the […]
How to Use Google Books
Google Books is one of my favorite search tools. Unfortunately, students often overlook it as a research tool unless they’ve been shown how it works. In this short video I provide a demonstrate of the key features of the current version of Google Books. In the video you’ll see how to: Search for a book. […]
How to Use Google Scholar to Find Federal and State Court Rulings
Earlier this week I wrote about and published a video about how to use Google Scholar to research inventions and their inventors. Case law research is a third aspect of Google Scholar that can be helpful to student researchers. The case law search function in Google Scholar enables you to find Federal and state cases […]
Wolves in My Yard and Penguins in My House! – Fun With Augmented Reality in Search
Thanks to where I live and the amount of time that I’ve spent hiking, camping, fly fishing I have slightly more experience seeing wildlife like bears and moose than the average person. Almost every night at dinner my three-year-old asks me to tell a story about seeing a bear, a moose, or other animal. But […]
5 Features of Google Advanced Search That Students Should Know How to Use
One of last week’s most popular post was this one in which I explained how excluding words from search results helped my students get past a little roadblock in their quest to find plans for an Arduino car. Excluding words from search results is one of many features in Google’s Advanced Search menu that students […]
Internet Archive Scholar – An Academic Version of the Internet Archive
The Internet Archive warehouses all kinds of fantastic materials (and some not-so-fantastic) that can be useful to teachers and students. The trouble with it is the organization is a little clunky for research purposes. Even if you limit the scope of your search to webpages and text you can still spend a lot of time […]
How to Compare Information on Wolfram Alpha
As I mentioned in a blog post published over the weekend, Wolfram Alpha is useful for more than just solving math and science problems. In fact, it can be a great resource for students who need to quickly find and compare background information on two or more people, places, or things. In the following video […]
Three Alternatives to Wiki Summarizer
This afternoon I received an email from a reader who wondered what happened to Wiki Summarize. I don’t know other than it is no longer online. It was a nice tool that helped students see long Wikipedia entries in chunks. It also included a web of related terms to help students see how topics were […]
Google Books Ngram Viewer Overview
The Google Books Ngram Viewer is a search tool that displays when and how often a term appears in books indexed by Google Books. By using the Ngram Viewer you can discover when a term starts to appear in literature, how often a term appears, and when a term loses popularity in literature. In the […]
Three Mobile Apps That Can Help Students Search
Students might forget their lunches, their gym shoes, and their homework assignments when they leave their houses in the morning, but they never forget their mobile phones. We can help students put those mobile devices to good use through the use of mobile search apps. Google Goggles is a free Android app that lets students […]