Thing #7 Cool Google Tools

Google Alert
This is a smart tool for teachers and students to use to receive notification about new information as it becomes available. Students and teachers tracking news about a current event such as the current NASA Phoenix Mars expedition would be able to easily keep up with the most recent discoveries. As the search results change for a previous search, the Google Alert proactively tells the user when new information is available. Since students cannot have school email accounts or check their personal email accounts at school, using this tool may pose a problem for that learning group.

Picasa Web Albums
I was quite surprised when I logged in to Picasa Web Albums and found the pictures I had uploaded to my blog already in my web album! Even the title of my blog was imported as the new title of my web album. Kind of scary (how much privacy do we sacrifice for convenience these days?!), but very handy. It’s a similar sort of web-sharing that I found when using Yahoo’s Flickr and exporting pictures to my blog.
One interesting feature in Picasa is the Organize option, which lets the user see every picture/image on the computer/laptop hard drive. The feature lets the user rename and move pictures around for easier access later. I saw pictures and images I had forgotten I had saved over the past few years. What a great tool.
One drawback I noticed was that because Picasa and my blog are linked, if I delete a photo in Picasa, it automatically deletes it in my blog. Not a good thing for one who has a history of deletion blunders. Also, I found Picasa much less user friendly than Flickr when searching for community shared photos.

Note: I looked at several of the Atomic Learning videos for several of the Google Tools and liked the quick and easy explanations. Some were much better explanations of the tools than the Google web site tutorials!