Skills update – or updating skills?

So many of our tech skills are learnt on the fly, as “just-in-time” learning experiences, that it can be hard to feel confident about one’s skill levels. Thus when I saw a notice regarding Google’s Power Searching course I decided to sign up – it is summer holidays for us here in Hong Kong, so I have a bit more time free to tackle different things.

Today I sat down and ran through the pre-course assessment and all of Lesson One.

Topics covered were:

• Filtering search results by colour
• How Google works
• The art of keyword choices
• Word order matters
• Finding text on a web page

Most of this I already knew, but running through the explanations and activities has given me some ideas on lesson plans to use with my classes at school, especially the word order and keyword choices activities.

Something new to me is using colour filtering to pull out a particular type of document from a set of image results – examples used in the Google lessons were:

• filtering a search about college entry by <white> to collect all of the graphs and tables (on white backgrounds)
• filtering a search for ‘tesla’ by <purple> to find images of tesla coils, by <white> to find photos of Mr Tesla, and by <red> to find sports cars

I’ve done images searches and filtered by image type before to produce only line drawings or only photos, but it had never occurred to me to scan the results, pick a background colour that seems common to the type of results I am after, and filter that way.

Related to that last point is the <find similar> option: hover over an image thumbnail, then click on <Similar> in the lower left corner to retrieve images like it.

So far (one unit in) this is more like a refresher than anything really new, however I am getting ideas for use in the classroom and with colleagues, so I would call that a good way to use some of my holiday time.