Need some words translated?

I speak pretty decent Spanish, but there are times when I need to make a phone call home to a Spanish speaking family, and I get really nervous about saying the wrong thing. Of course, I write out a script, but I also keep my web browser open to Google Translate in case I need some support on the fly.

Of course, it's not perfect, but I think translating has come a long way since Babelfish, and it's quick and easy to go back and forth (there is a "swap" button at the bottom, to switch translations quickly). It also came in handy during my French course!

Bonus: It can also translate web pages - useful for sending home to parents in-class blogs or textbooks resources. Check out this blog in French!

See what is blocked before you click!

How many times a day do you google something, find a bunch of results, and then they are all blocked?! You know that you don't want your kids seeing certain things on the internet, so you are of course thankful for filters at school, but how frustrating can it be to click, back, click, back, click, back until you find a relevant page that isn't blocked? SO FRUSTRATING!

CoolPreviews is a nifty Firefox add-on for Windows, Mac, and Linux that you install and will let you see a preview of the webpage the link is connected too. This helps you figure out what you need faster, doesn't take as long as going back and forth between search results and each page, and will tell you right away if the site is blocked or not from behind your school's firewall.

There is a cool tutorial video about CoolPreviews if you still aren't convinced, and as always, feel free to leave thoughts or questions in the comments!

See who sees your site, and who reads your blog!

 Today's Trinket is more of a behind the scenes tool for teachers, and is probably for more advanced users. But feel free to ask questions of me in the comments!

Ok, I am a huge Goog-a-phile. They have so many things that are teacher friendly, and have really changed the way I use the internet. My latest favorite is Google Analytics, a free tool that lets you track traffic to your site or blog. Web Analytics is a new up and coming field that looks and where people are looking at your site, how long they stay, how many repeat users you have, what pages they look at, etc. It's pretty simple to use, and very entertaining! 

For instance, a day after I started this blog I saw that I had 13 unique visitors to this site, which was viewed 20 times! That means that some of those 13 people went to my blog more than than others (let's call those people my favorites). I can also see that there are people in Mountain View looking at it (want to hire me yet Google?!) and also people in Illinois. The average time on the site is 2 minutes, so I know I need to make my posts short for their attention span, but it looks like people are reading it! 

So, sign up (you don't have a google account yet! Oh my! Get one NOW and turn your life around!) and put the code they give you into the HTML (lots of webpage tools or blog tools have a spot where you can "edit html", find that and stick it in - don't worry, it's invisible to everyone else!). Then watch the graphs, see if your children look at your site, and think about maybe how you can improve based on this info.

Any other ideas? Leave some comments for others to read!