Google Translate

Today we explored Google Translate.  Google Translate is a very useful tool when needing to look up a word or phrase in a different language.  However, all of my Spanish teachers have cautioned that most of the online translators do not pay attention to verb tenses, so they suggest not translating entire passages with things like Google Translate.  But for just a few words or a phrase, it is awesome!  Plus, it is cool to see how things are translated in different languages. 
On my screenshot, I translated a phrase from Spanish to English.

Google Web Search Features

Today we explored how to use Google's Web Search Features.  Google's Web Search Features are extremely cool.  They allow you to search for specific things in your area, like weather, stocks, time, sunsets/sunrises, sports scores, and music.  Google also has reference tools that you can use, like a calculator, book searches, profile searches, unit converters, and public data which includes data like population and unemployment rates in a certain state.  In addition, they have movie showtimes, synonym and antonym finders, spell checker, the numbers to poison control and suicide prevention, medication searches, flu vaccine searches, money converters, package tracking and patent searches.  Basically, Google is just making searches easier to navigate through by making them specific to one subject.

Google Shopping

Today we explored Google Shopping. On Google Shopping, you can search for a product and it will bring up the most popular sites to buy that item on.  The nice thing about Google Shopping is that you don't have to wade through all of the websites praising or hating the product that you searched for.  Basically, you just search for the product you are looking for and shop away!
In my screenshot, I searched for princess Halloween  costumes.

Google News

Today we explored Google News. Google news is a good idea, because instead of just doing a general Google search on a news story, you could just go to Google News and type it in there.  On Google News, only the news stories show up, so there isn't random blogs or advertisements that mention the story.  One of the popular stories in the news right now is the story about the Chilean miners, so that is what I searched for in my screenshot.  I wasn't really aware of what was going on with them, so Google News did an awesome job providing up-to-date stories and back stories to help readers understand.

Google Maps

Today we explored Google Maps.  Google maps is just another one of the many features that Google has.  On Google maps, you enter a starting address and a destination into the search and then hit enter.  Google maps will give you a picture with the most convenient route and directions to (or from) the destination.  One of the neat features about Google maps are the different types of maps that they offer.  For example, on the "traffic" feature, Google will show the speed of traffic in populated areas.  The regular "map" feature just shows highways, and the "satellite" feature shows basically a picture of the surrounding area.  If you drag the little orange person to a spot on the map, it will zoom so that you can literally navigate up and down the streets to see landmarks and the town's streets.  Freshman year if you dropped the person on Buckeye you could see me driving past the Seelye Mansion in my car!