Teachers (and most people) Should Use Google Alert

The "Creating Lifelong Learners" blog has a good suggestion for school employees to use 'Google Alert' to search for their name. I use it for most members of my family and have found a few errors which were then corrected. The posting is below or you can access the blog site by clicking here.

Google Alerts

One of Google’s less popular and most useful tools is Google Alerts.

Google Alerts allows you sign-up for e-mail notifications related to any search term. I use it, for example, to track any mentions of “Mathew Needleman” (my name) or “Matthew Needleman” (the popular mispelling of my name). It’s a narcissist’s dream. But aside from the big head it may give you, it’s a good idea for any teacher to track their public persona, check for fake Myspace pages, etc.

Bloggers should also set alerts for their blogs (I find it’s more reliable than technorati for finding incoming links) and presenters should set up alerts for their presos to find out when they’re being talked about.

Knowing how to use Google well can also allow you to customize your searchers. For example, when searching for Paradigm speakers, I set an alert to search for:

paradigm site:craigslist.com

to alert me whenever Paradigm speakers were listed on Craigslist (hence the “site:” part of the search term.

In the classroom, you could use this to search for particular topics related to your curriculum. For example, searching for any timely references to fossils, physics, or medicine that may show up in particular news sources.

The alternative is to continually launch google and keep searching for this or that. Google alerts allows you to find this information instantaneously and never miss out.

For more information, see Google’s Alert’s Support Info. and Google Cheat Sheet to learn to search smarter.

What do you use Google Alerts for?

Update: Google Alerts sent me an alert about this post within 2 hours of me writing it:

Google Alerts « Creating Lifelong Learners
By Mathew Needleman
I use it, for example, to track any mentions of “Mathew Needleman” (my name) or “Matthew Needleman” (the popular mispelling of my name). It’s a narcissist’s dream. But aside from the big head it may give you, it’s a good idea for any …
Creating Lifelong Learners – http://www.needleworkspictures.com/ocr/blog/