I discovered the Google Ngram Viewer from this TED Talk by Erez Lieberman Aiden and Jean-Baptiste Michel who are both fellows at Harvard University and Visiting Faculty at Google. They created the tool to analyse the millions of books being digitised by Google to allow them to search for cultural trends.

Using the Ngram Viewer would certainly be an interesting data handling lesson for children!

It has probably been around for a while but I have just spotted the Google Image Search within a Google Document. But more significant is that the images are automatically filtered according to a commercial re-use license. Whatever you find there will be acceptable to use. 

You can see how the image search box within Google Docs works below and I have highlighted the small note explaining the license.

In my final weeks of school our class had our usual Tuesday afternoon guided reading session, where we get the opportunity to work on some reading text with a small group of children. One particular comment from a pupil has stuck in my mind, so I thought I would share some of my reflections with you.

Whilst exploring a text we came across a particular word that became the focus of our attention. Although the group had no problem reading and pronouncing it they didn’t know what it meant. I aimed to set the children off exploring the definition from the information we could acquire from the sentence and the text overall, we may have even cracked open a dictionary or two…

“We could just Google it!”

As you can see the comment from one of the group stuck in my mind for a number of reasons. Firstly it indicated to me how much web searching had become part of how these 9 and 10 years olds process the information they see in the world. The concept of search applies to so much around them and the need for a better understanding of how we instruct and guide our classes to filter what they find, has never been so more acute.

Equally the appropriateness of using different tools is a key part of navigating the learning landscape, indeed one of the most difficult aspects is helping young learners make better decisions regarding the tools they use.

Of course I was not surprised by this comment after all many of the children have Kindles and the latest model has a full Oxford English Dictionary available on it. The children simply have to move a cursor and the definition will be displayed on the screen at the bottom. I remember writing lists of words I didn’t know from texts during my English degree and finding out later.

The immediacy of information and indeed the expectation for it is all to clear. We expect results, definitions and answers faster nowadays and so do the children in our classes. The question is what are we doing about it?

Within the browser too you have access to dictionary tools to help when you are reading online. I use Google Chrome’s extension which allows you to double-click a word and a little pop-up dictionary definition appears. I use this loads – no more written lists of vocabulary for me!

Another reason the comment struck a chord with me is how the decision to Google a word comes ahead of trying to establsish meaning from reading skills, such as reading into the context and exploring the sentence further. Of course, this one comment should not be over played. However in my opinion it does hint at the ways children are thinking about processing the information, from reading material or otherwise, we work with everyday.

I am of course an advocate for the appropriate use of technology, where it can transform learning and add value – and in this instance it is not a “this skill replaces that skill” scenario but an opportunity to reflect on the ways we can enhance what we do and take advantage of ideas children have.

To answer my own question in the title, yes they are in a broadly positive way, but especially children in primary school or elementary need support and guidance to help them filter the information they search. They need contextualised examples and ongoing references to the ways we search and use information tools – I think this is a pivotal aspect of teaching and can only become more acute in the coming years.

I have a new crowd-sourcing idea up my sleeve that needs your help and input. It is all based around the idea of a collaborative search engine that can be constructed together – Shared Search.

Elevator Pitch

• A community of educators work together on a Google custom search engine (CSE).
• The CSE can be for any specific topic taught in the classroom.
• A new CSE is created and collaborators are invited (like Google Docs) to add suitable sites.
• Labels are added to the sites to filter their relevance, this can be used in the search results too – which means it can be relevant to different age groups.
• Up to 100 collaborators can be invited to any one CSE.
• The broader the pool of contributions the richer the search experience for the pupil.
• The code will be shared to educators who want to embed it in their schools sites and blogs.
• The community generate a growing library of relevant search engines for different curriculum topics.

So what do you think? Are you interested in helping with the first one. I have set up a search engine about SEALIFE, as this is a common topic and one that has a huge amount of content.

The idea of a Shared Search is that we act as first filter to the children’s own experience of searching online content.

If you have some underwater web gems to share please sign up in the form below and look out for the email invite into the Custom Search Engine. I look forward to seeing your response and I hope that we can once again help create something valuable together.

Why not try out the “SEALIFE” Shared Search below. Remember as more people contribute sites the more useful it will become.

We have been spending some time with my Dad who has been visiting us from Australia. During his stay with us I realised, more than usual, how the internet makes no impact on his life. It led me to think through the behaviours that many of us have grown accustomed to.

I kind of get the impression that members of his generation either made a choice to have a computer and so eventually to use the internet, or indeed let it pass them by. My Dad worked in insolvency for many years, times of tape dictaphones and typists. His business offices were all about paper information and it was physically organised. I remember book keeping – spreadsheets must have been a sight for sore eyes.

Dad lives in South Australia for most of the year now and enjoys writing letters to us about all of his adventures. His penmanship is fantastic and I always enjoy reading them. It almost feels strange to hold a personal message for me, handwritten with a fountain pen. Usually his missives are two or three pages of A4. We may have learned to communicate via 140 characters (or less) but what has that restriction done to old fashioned letter writing? What have we given up?

I was lucky enough to have Google Voice Search demonstrated to me by the mobile Product Manager at the Teacher Academy in London. It works really well and with the new Froyo 2.2 update will allow you to control much of your phone with just your voice. I showed Dad and tried it with the search term “Best restaurants in Adelaide”. As the phone recognised what I had said and immediately displayed a map with the eateries he was pretty impressed. Then he went through the list and said, “Eaten there, yes and that one, and that one, enjoyed the starters there…” He hadn’t done such a search but had probably visited these places in his own journey to find out the restaurants he enjoys. Perhaps they were recommended, but I can safely say he wasn’t swayed by a single online review. What experiences he must have enjoyed exploring those places. His opinion probably contradicted that of some reviews – good that he hadn’t run that search after all, perhaps he would have missed out. How much do we truly make up our own mind these days?

If we so choose, we can control a deluge of information and news to come to us, on our mobiles, on our televisions. A constant feed or stream. Every day Dad heads to the shops to buy the newspaper. That is his way of gathering the daily news, from the printed press. The obvious criticism is of course that it is from one source, but what must he gain everyday from his journey to gather it? Would you walk somewhere to pick up a blog update? The physical act of collecting it is an investment, everything is a click away for us, we don’t invest in the gathering of information in the same way – we can pick it up and drop it just as quickly. It is the impact of this on the information sources themselves that is the most intriguing.

Every evening/morning he listens to the radio, well he calls it the “wireless” – my “wireless” is no less important to me.

The crossword he does is the cryptic one, you know the really tricky one. He doesn’t jump on Google at the first sign of trouble but puts it to one side and gets a cup of tea. He lets the information brew as well and slowly he forms connections with something he read here, a past crossword clue there or a fact he knew. It might take a few moments or a few hours but suddenly he would let out a victorious serendipitous yelp as he figures it out. Not a search query in sight other than his own synaptic workout. Sometimes he finished the puzzle, sometimes not, but he has probably on average 18-24 moments of serendipitous victory a day. That can only be good for your brain.

–

It has been interesting to make these comparisons in internet and non-internet use, however I wouldn’t change the way I interact with it now. It offers me a great perspective on my self and my work. It allows me to connect to others both near and far. I can find out stuff without really trying, I don’t even need to type.

But my behaviours raise questions too – do we have a stronger sense of self nowadays or are we too reliant on our networks, connections to others and “you may also like”? Can we form genuinely unbiased opinions of products and services, restaurants and experiences with the internet? Do we need to? Will the good in life always rise to the top of the web? There are things we don’t consider important anymore because we can Google it – surely the journey to the papershop can be just as important as what we collect.

Thanks Dad for causing me to think this through.

I say more yelps of serendipity please.

Google Squared is a wonderful search tool, undiscovered in my opinion, for the primary classroom due to the structure it provides – but also because of the flexibility to work directly in the search environment.

(Read Google Squared: A Complete Guide for more information about how to use it in the classroom.)

Ponte stretto by DanielaNob 
Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs License

As it is still in the Labs I think it is important to contribute in a small way to the changes that could take place so based on my classroom experiences, here are mine:

1. Search for values and add back to the square - would be great for children to decide that the presented values are not accurate enough, go to a regular search and then have a little button beside the source to ADD TO SQUARE.
2. Change source for images too – when values have other possible sources we can change them. Sometimes the image is not as useful or appropriate as it could be. Would be useful to change the source or select a different image. Would also be great to integrate Creative Commons licensing for the images.
3. Confidence rate the data used – some of the values presented show a confidence rating, would be useful for us to be able to rate that info too. If it isn’t relevant to the search we have done then we can say.
4. Colour change for added search – when you “Add to Square” it would be useful to be able to have a visual cue to the separate searches you have added.
5. Embed - would be great to be able to grab the code to embed the Square in a blog or other site. You can do it from the exported Spreadsheet but would be nice to be able to add it straight from the Square.
6. Send the Square – would like to be able to grab the link or email directly from the Square.
7. Suggest a category from a duff search- rather then having to build from scratch after a duff search – it would be good if Squared was able to suggest a category from what you added. Did you mean…
8. Other media – please add Youtube and audio clips – we have been looking at Whales using Squared and would have been great for the class to see and hear these amazing animals right there in the search results. Maybe you could add Twitter as well – tweets from users about the category. “I just saw a humpback whale on our boat trip…”
9. Description source – changing the source of the description would be useful to allow greater access to the text. Especially useful when using Simple Wikipedia for example. Perhaps you could also change language as well for the whole Square.
10. Fix the Image insert for exported spreadsheets – when a Square is exported to a Google Spreadsheet the image appears as the URL. As Spreadsheets supports images it would be great to see these right there in the sheet so what you Square is exactly what you export.

I hope that the engineers at Google find them useful. Please let me know how you think Google Squared might be improved, especially in light of classroom experience.

Google Squared is a product of Google Labs. It displays your search results in a grid format. Each item found for your search term populates the rows and their common attributes are shown in the columns. Rather then listing the web pages, your results are organised.

In my opinion it is vital that we don’t just assume that primary school children, who have grown up with “Google” as a verb, can search internet content effectively.

In July last year Google search engineers recorded 1 trillion unique URLs that they indexed, and that was more than a year ago. The amount of information at our pupil’s fingertips is amazing. Sometimes it is too much.

I think Google Squared is a great addition to classroom searching as it provides well needed structure to those search results. It doesn’t just provide a list of sites to click on but a grid of types of information. Google Squared is limited to the types of search terms that can be “Squared” but I think the added structure is a huge benefit to the experience of finding information.

For this post I have produced a series of screenshots and will highlight some of the unique features of searching internet content in this way to help you get the most from Google Squared in the classroom.

(The Flickr slideshow is best viewed in fullscreen)

Information Validity

When a cell isn’t populated with results it provides a great opportunity to explore and teach information validity. We not only need to help children develop their search skills to connect with information, we need to model and teach how to judge the quality of what we see. Just because it is online doesn’t mean it is any good, accurate or indeed useful.

With a regular Google search you will always get results. Using Google Squared often leaves you with gaps in the Square. This is a good thing. These gaps in the search results allow children the opportunity to make decisions about what should be included. We have been using Google Squared during our “Whale Week” and children had to engage much more directly with the information in these gaps, then they would with a regular Google search results.

One example that occurred in class last week was whether a Blue Whale would live for just 10 years or nearly 100 according to the Google Squared results. With some support we were able to see that most of the other values provided for whales were over 50 years and so we were able to define what was most appropriate. Another example was the length of one of the whales, which suggested it was over 100 metres! On closer inspection it showed we found it was referring to the USS Narwhal – a submarine!

Try this search for the wives of Henry VIII and see if you can spot the anomaly. These inaccuracies should be embraced as great opportunities to help illustrate information validity.

Measures

Although there is an option to automatically standardise the units of measurement in any given column – the maths that is involved to convert these would be a great activity.

A search for Bridges provides the ideal range of data for such a task. Children could change the Longest Span, Height or Total Length to KM or M. Other good examples include Cruise Ships, Skyscrapers and Super Cars (Super cars results all seem to be in millimetres which is great to do some conversion into centimetres and metres)

Building a Square

For the average classroom I think Google Squared provides a great opportunity to explore and learn about the very act of searching – not just viewing the results. Building a Square of results should be considered a learning outcome in it’s own right.

I think that this would be a great learning activity because of the way the children would have to engage with the validity of the results, the way it can be built from scratch and the choices a child would have to make to refine the accuracy of their work.

Your challenge today is to build me a Google Square showing me as much as you can about 3D Shapes.

More Search Ideas

The Google Search Curriculum provides lots of valuable resources for regular Google searches. It provides basic, intermediate and advanced lessons for three different modules:

• Understanding Search Engines
• Web Search Technique and Strategies
• Google Web Search Features

I believe that Google Squared would be a worthy addition to this “curriculum” because it is not only a search tool, it provides the structure and choice to help children become better at judging the quality of information online. Most importantly it allows children to directly interact with search results as they build their square.

Why not explore some alternative search engines for the classroom in this Interesting Ways to Use resource.

If you haven’t looked at Google Squared before I strongly recommend you take some time to explore it. I hope that some of the ideas and screenshots in this post give you some inspiration to use it with your own classes, let me know how it would be included in your work.