The "G" in Google Stands for Gifts!

The gifts that Google Search gives us just keep on giving! But before we get into that, let me just tell you how the week went and why I am just now adding this post on Sunday afternoon!

Overwhelmed: give too much of a thing to (someone); inundate.  Well, that about sums up my work week!  I was hoping with the Labor Day holiday, life would somehow slow down...just a bit. But noooo!  After the lovely day off on Monday, our school district had inservice, followed by another half day of professional development at my building.  Now don't get me wrong, I believe that the profession of teaching is an ever-changing field which needs to employ the most capable teachers and ensure best practices for students.  We are shaping the minds of the future for goodness sakes! However, getting too many good ideas at once and being expected to "roll them out" yesterday is a common theme in my school district.  I know that in time I will lose that overwhelmed feeling and instead feel powerful! Empowered: make (someone) stronger and more confident.

Now for the good stuff...
In order to feel more empowered and confident with my new learning from inservice, I need to know more about integrating subjects with the Common Core State Standards.  Some great features I found in Google Search are choosing articles by reading level, previewing text and creating a custom search engine (see next post).  All of these features will help me to weave reading, research and writing together while differentiating for my students all at once! Now this, my friends, will empower me and my students and remove that feeling of being overwhelmed.  This week we are reading a fictional text about a very helpful dog named Pipilio.  It is one of my favorite stories from our textbook because lets face it, who doesn't love a heartfelt story about a hero dog?  Our writing time will be centered around real life dog "heroes" as service dogs.  So I utilized the custom search engine and the reading level feature of Google Search to create an easier path for my students to do their research. I also used the Google preview search to find books that I could use as a read aloud or that my students could use as additional research.  All you do is type in the search term, go to google tools, pull down "any books" and select preview available.  It's that simple!  You can check out the video below to get more detailed instruction on the preview tool.

When feeling overwhelmed just remember... 

new knowledge + practice = empowered & confident.

Happy Previewing!

- Sarah