Two new great features from Google

I just saw this presentation by Google on youtube and thought that I would share it with you. The presentation in it self is about an hour long (but still worth watching!), but if you don't have the time, they've released 2 short videos about the 2 main subjects of the presentation.

The first one is Google Goggles and is searching by picture. It lets you take pictures of books, landmarks and other things, and then gives you the informations it thinks your asking for.

The other one is Real Time Search. It lets you search a subject and then shows you the newest information on it, from twitter to serious news sites. It also takes you location into consideration, so the posts being shown is different from place to place.

Another cool feature that was announced was voice search in Chinese and Japanese. They also demonstrate an audio translate feature to android phones. They can all be seen in the presentation here.

Google Chrome just got better

For more than half a year, I've been using google chrome as my standard browser. This because of to factors.

1) I've found it to be much faster than any of the other browsers.

2) There almost no "waste of space"

Both IE and Firefox has from my point of view a lot of space that is wasted. Both on extention, but they also have a window-box wich creates a line in the top and in the bottom of the screen that isn't used for anything relevant. In Chrome the top line have been merged with the tabs, and the bottom line only appears when loading a page.

The only minus have been the lack of extensions. But not anymore!

Now it is possible for the beta version of chrome to add extensions, and it doesn't make the interface any bigger. All it does is make your search-bar a little shorter and add the extension.

As you can see I currently have three extensions installed. The first from the right is myAdThwart that works like Adblock plus for Firefox. The next two is my Gmail and my Googlewave. Both let me know if there's any new messages in any of the two, and in this picture I have one in each. If you want to see what kind of extensions are available you can look at this page https://chrome.google.com/extensions .

Otherwise you can see this short video explaining extensions for Google chrome.

Literacy 2.0

This video from Google is from the conference for Breakthrough Learning in a Digital Age with the focus in this video on Literacy 2.0.

The first 36 min. is about what's possible in education today, and how connecting formal learning with informal learning can help the students learn in their own pace. They also talk about the new form of literacy that is required in the digital age, like using and creating new visual information and finding the information you need.

The people from Google then talks about searching, saying "searching is learning", and how the internet have changed what we need to learn. Almost every piece of information is available through the internet, so people no longer need to know, but they need to differentiate the information and use it in a creative context.

After that the panel takes questions from the audience.