Google's New Features That Are Easy to Love

Google has unveiled several features that are useful for teaching and learning purposes. The latest readability feature can be found in "Advanced Search." You can use the drop-down menu next to the heading of "Reading level" to request that your search results show "basic," "intermediate," or "advanced" level. Although Google folks do not divulge detailed criteria used for their categorization system, they claim that the system was developed based on the way their hired teachers sorted web pages into the "basic," "intermediate," and "advanced" piles, so to speak. This advanced tool should be handy when you want to filter out web content that is full of hard words, for example.

Another Google feature, which has been around for some time, is instant search, meaning as soon as you start typing in a search term, Google provides you with instant suggestions, trying to help you complete your search term. I've heard some ESL teachers creatively use this feature to teach word order, sentence patterns, word collocations, etc.

Still another feature is translate, found on the drop down menu when you click on "more" at the top the Google homepage screen. The neat thing about this feature is that you can have Google translate an entire web page into another language and use the URL of the translated page however you want to. Simply type the URL of a web page in the text window, specify the translate-from and translate-to languages, and voila, you have just helped someone to understand the gist of some important information in their native language, in spite of the imperfection of the translation.

The fourth feature is books, again found on the drop down menu when you click on "more." On the next screen, you can "Browse books and magazines" on the left panel in order to read hundreds of thousands of old books and magazines as well as preview newer books, all right on your computer screen. Or, after you click on "Books" from the drop down menu mentioned above, you can go directly to the Google eBook Store, where you can find thousands of free eBooks to read online or download to your e-reader device. The direct link to the Google's new eBook Store is: http://books.google.com/ebooks.

Finally, Google has tried to pre-group similar images together and present them in a fun way with a feature called Google image swirl. Click http://image-swirl.googlelabs.com/ to see for yourself how your can utilize these picture exhibits for your classroom teaching.