Immediately upon reading this year’s GaETC workshop offerings, my attention was drawn to Patrick Crispen’s three hour Google workshop.  Patrick has been a presenter many times at our Georgia conferences.  He is on staff at California State University in Long Beach.  In our high school media center, we are making an effort each day to assist students in collecting creditable research for their assignments.  Of course the preferred resource is the internet.  There is so much information---one knows not where to begin. 

Patrick Crispen is so kind to post his helpful hints and guide to Google for anyone to use.  He has been around teachers enough to know they have no money.  So “free of charge” is such a heavenly melody.  Patrick’s website www.netsquirrel.com  is the home of his conference presentations available to anyone at anytime free of charge.

I plan to share some of his PowerPoint slides with my staff and with our students.  I have listed some of his most useful tips for searching Google that I will share.

• Google searches keywords as phrases and the order of the keywords is important
• Adjacency matters-how close certain keywords are to one another in text
• Use quotes or dashes to search for phrases
• Use the + to require an exact match
• Use – to exclude a word or phrase
• Google accepts up to 32 keywords
• Using ~with no space before a keyword searches the synonyms of the keyword

Other slides explain advanced searching.  “more>>” lists Google Services and Google Tools.

Since my attendance at the conference several students and teachers are now using Google Earth. 

When I stop to think how information literacy has changed in the past 10-15 years, it is amazing how far we have come so quickly. There is so much information that students now have at their fingertips.  Their world is so fast paced. It is no wonder teachers must change their manner of teaching in order to keep learning interesting and exciting for today’s students.  Therefore, it is all the more important that the state and other organizations offer inservice for those of us who play a part in introducing  new programs, strategies and services to our classroom teachers.