Thing #12

Google

I decided to look further into Google Alerts and Google Translate. I really liked google alerts a lot, I set my google alerts to look for stories about Clarksville Montgomery County School System and elementary literacy strategies. I think that using google alerts is another quick and easy way of getting information as it becomes available. I liked how you could change the settings to the alerts as well. I set my alerts up for every week. I think that this is a good tool to stay current on school related information.  I can also see how it can be used for anything a person would want to look up whether it be business or pleasure. 

I also tried Google Translate. I think this would be a great tool if a teacher had ELL students in their classroom and wanted to find a way to help the student along with their integration in the classroom. Although I think Google Translate is a great idea, I would advise against any language student taking the translation verbatim. I translated a few paragraphs from Le Petit Prince, a child's story from French into English and there were a few errors where google translate took a direct translation of the text which when read in English did not make much sense. I would cross reference any translation from this to make sure it made sense when translated. For a quick translation back and forth between languages I think that this is a great tool to help ELL students and to help the whole class work with ELL students.