Technology Tidbits

Summer Technology Workshops & Meetings - 2009
Submitted by Graci Gillming
Technology Training Coordinator
ESU 10

21st Century Skills – You’ve heard the phrase but may not be sure what it involves. The summer technology workshops and meetings at ESU 10 can help you get a better understanding of the skills and experiences that students will need to confidently enter a technology-rich working environment— and have fun learning along the way. All workshops are based upon curricular and/or technology standards.
For more information and registration, visit https://odie.esu10.org.

Click here to read the rest of the article and see the list of technolgy workshops!

Information Literacy: Two New Internet Search Engines
Submitted by Jason Everett
Technology Trainer
ESU 10

A lot of Internet searches go through Google. It's definitely one of the most popular search engines right now. However, there are two new search engines you may want to take a look at. These may offer a different approach to how you look at searches.

Bing
Bing is Microsoft's new competitor with Google. It offers a nice clean interface and relevant results. You'll notice many similarities to Google so using it won't be much of a challenge or a change to how you currently search. Notes of interest are on the results page. Bing does a nice job of showing you other relevant searches. The advanced search is much simpler than Google's and so may be a little harder to come up with complex searches. Schools will like the fact that Bing puts all of what it considers "explicit" images or thumbnails on a separate server so that it is easy to filter these images without having to filter all images.

Wolfram Alpha
Wolfram Alpha is a very new service with a totally different approach to searches. It's approach is data driven. The engine behind the scenes is built on the software Mathmatica. It really has a different result when doing searches. It will take complex data sets and try to display them in a meaningful way. For example, if you search for your hometown, it will display a map, the population, etc. instead of just displaying a list of other websites with the name of the city. There are several example listed on the right side of the main website that you'll want to check out.

Try them out. I think you'll find some good results from other search engines.

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