How to Use Google to Find Teacher Resources

Teachers: Do you need lesson plans, books and other resources? Are you overwhelmed by the huge number of results that come up when you Google "lesson plans" (9.76 million results, at last check)?

Don't be. Here are a few tips and tricks to help you refine your Google searching and find the free, useful teacher resources you need.

1. First of all, did you know that Google has an entire section on its site just for educators? It's aptly named "Google for Educators." There are tools for your classroom, a discussion group and information about the Google Teachers Academy.

2. Use Google's Book Search to look through books. At Google Book Search, you can search inside a growing library of books. You can see previews of the covers, tables of contents and even some of the pages plus additional information about the books. Try a search for "Marco Polo" and look at some of the results that come up. If you find a book you like, the search results include several links to buy the book.

3. Find Microsoft Powerpoint presentations and other documents tailored to your subject. One of Google's most powerful features is that it allows you to search only for certain filetypes. To do this, you simply add in the phrase "filetype:" followed by the filetype extension you want (don't put a space after the colon).

The filetype extension is the three- or four-letter bit after the period at the end of a file's name (So, for your Microsoft word document, "Essay.doc," the filetype extension is "doc" -- easy, isn't it?). So to find Microsoft Powerpoint presentations, which have the filetype "ppt," you simply put "filetype:ppt" in your Google search. To find Powerpoint presentations about magnets, for example, do a Google search for "magnets filetype:ppt" (but don't put it in quotes). Voila!

You can do this with other file types. Try adding "filetype:doc" to search only Microsoft Word documents, "filetype:pdf" to search only Adobe PDFs, and so on and so forth. To search multiple file types at once, put an "OR" in the middle, as in "magnets filetype:doc OR filetype:ppt" -- now you're an expert Google searcher!

4. Use Google Custom Search Engine to search only the sites you want. You can create your own Google search engine and specify exactly which sites you want to search in. You could add your favorite teacher resources sites, sites other teachers have made, professional sites you visit often and more. You can add or change what sites it searches at any time.