Thing #12 Using Googles Vast Resources

For this assignment I chose to use iGoogle and Google Translate. Both of these are amazing tools and I particularly enjoyed using Google Translate. iGoogle is a fun way to in my opinion, build your homepage of the internet. You can set up to see the weather, glimpses into your favorite websites, cool pictures or quotes, pretty much anything you can find on the internet can be added to your iGoogle homepage. Google Translate is an amazing tool to translate pretty much any language into pretty much any other language.

iGoogle could have a place in the classroom, however I find it to much more limited than Google Translate. With iGoogle I could see having a few gadgets on your page maybe from the school, or sources for your subject area to display on the page. With this you may be able to set up some sort of overview of the day for the students on say, an overhead projector. Outside of this, I really see no other application for the classroom.

Google Translate on the other hand, has an almost limitless place in the classroom. Some of the applications that I can see this service being useful for are, but certainly not limited too, accommodations for English as a second language students, translations of primary sources for use in history class rooms, easier communications between students who may speak different languages. Basically in my mind, any time you could (or rather will be) needing to communicate in some way with an individual using a different language, either through reading, writing, or spoken communication, Google Translate will have a place in the classroom.

Included in this post are my new iGoogle homepage that I built featuring my favorite websites, the weather, date and time, and some cool daily images. Also, check out the power of Google Translate. I was able to take the website China News, and translate the entire website into English. This first image is of the website in its original version and the second is the website translated through Google Translate in English.