Wednesday, November 3, 2010

Homeschooling with Google

This is one for the "who knew" category!

We're using a fantastic curriculum called Discovering Music. I adore this program! Professor Carol teaches music history and appreciation from a holistic perspective. The arts do not stand alone, isolated and independent. They are influenced by history, politics, culture, society. (I promise this isn't a just curriculum review!) I love this program because we are able to alter and supplement so that it has become our primary unit study. We are able to spin off history, art, language arts, and more simply by treating it as a unit study. My daughter is researching Thomas Edison today, and I've assigned her the task of creating a time line of his life as well as a circle of events showing things such as wars, discoveries, conflicts, etc that happened during or near Edison's lifetime. Being that she's now 13 I've started actually letting her do her own online research outside of my predetermined websites. (I know. Spooky, right?) She made the best discovery of her own today!

Did you know that Google now has a time line feature? Who knew?!

Play around for some fun:
1. Choose a topic and search Google as you normally would.
2. After you've received your search results head over to the left sidebar.
3. Locate the heading "Standard View."
4. You're there!

The time line feature is a wonderful way to highlight some of the important events associated with your main search term. By clicking on the highlighted date you can expand your search within a specific time frame. You can also choose to follow those links to learn more about each item listed. Fantastic!

Cut to the ShamWOW commercial... But wait. There's more!

If you click the "Wonder Wheel" link you'll be given a handy dandy, absoposolutely fantabulous graph of related items to chase! It's slightly dangerous and a little addictive if you are prone to three-hour rabbit trails like those of us who shall remain unnamed.

This just goes to prove that even after a decade of homeschooling one can still get excited about the little things. (Or that we're easily amused here. Either way works!)


3 comments:

Lorie said...

That is AWESOME! I never knew that but I just wasted like 20 minutes playing around with it. Ohhh this is dangerous. I can't wait to use it for our school projects.

Thanks so much for the tip!

Steph @ Wild Crickets said...

Isn't it awesome! I wasted quite a bit of time, too. It's a great - free! - resource! I think we'll be using it a lot in the future.

Lorus! said...

That is such a neat feature! I had no idea you could do that.