Google Features That Make Teachers' Lives Easier Part 2 - Wonder Wheel and Timeline

Today I’m sharing with you a couple of my favorite Google treasures, and these have the potential to finally make searching for students less stressful as they turn searching into a visual – Hooray!  I’m hoping this will eliminate some of the “being lost in the web” time teachers and students face and help to find better results more efficiently.  Honestly, I cannot wait for school to start and see how students interact with these features.  I hope you have fun playing with them and even more importantly, find great uses for them with your students.

 

Google’s Wonder Wheel

I am so pumped about this new feature from Google, which makes searching visual.  Even if students start with a general topic like civil war or a famous person’s name such as Amelia Earhart the Wonder Wheel helps guide students to a better search.  Here are the steps:

• Type in the search topic: civil war and press search
• Above your search results look for the “Show Options”

• Scroll down and find Wonder Wheel

• Now the wheel shows up in the center with suggestions and your search results have moved over to the right.

• The wheel is interactive, so simply click through the suggestions to narrow down your topic.  The results will change on the right and your search query will automatically change at the top.

• Continue to narrow down your topic through wheels – doesn’t that make searching easier?
• Now here is the cool part – the Google Boolean logic qualifiers still work with the Wonder Wheel.  Students can still type in good queries such as “civil war” +battles site:edu to find more reliable results and utilize the Wonder Wheel features.

I honestly believe this will take some of the “getting lost in the web” problems all students face and also help teachers to guide students through a more successful search. With any luck, even students as young as third grade will be able to start making successful Google searches with the Wonder Wheel.

PS - the Wonder Wheel does work for any search topic such as : lesson plans, novel guides, or even chocolate cake recipes.

Google Timeline Feature

The timeline has been around for a while under the Google Labs experiments, but now it’s easier to find and utilize.  This feature provides a timeline where students can narrow down search results by year. 

• Type in your search query such as civil war
• Click on Show Options and scroll down to Timeline

• The search results will be in chronological order.
  

• It still makes sense to utilize good search terms for better results.  With a completely general term, Google is pulling results for any civil war.

• Then narrow down your results by clicking through the timeline if you know the dates of your event.

• Looking for the most recent information posted on an event?  Look back over to the left and notice Any Time.  Here you can choose recent web publications about the topic.

Now think about those research papers that deal with timely information.  If a student is researching something on current technology, he can pull results within the last year and filter out the dated information.  Talk about easy!

Next post will feature Google Squared, a new feature that allows students to compare information side by side - yep, it's another cool one!