Tech Tool of the Week: Google Custom Search

This week's tech tip is yet another cool tool from Google. Did you know that you can create your own customized search engine? Google Custom Search allows you to build a search engine customized with content for your grade level or for a particular unit of study. 

To get a sense of what a Google Custom Search looks like, check out this kid-friendly search engine created by a teacher. Try typing a term into the search box and look at the results. You'll notice that the results look like any other Google Search results, but now take a closer look at the sources. All of the results are from pages that the search creator chose.

One great feature of Google Custom Search is the ability to invite collaborators to contribute to your search engine. You could collaborate with other teachers to create a customized Google search, or even have your students help you build the custom search engine. 

To create your own customized search engine, go to the Google Search Engine home page and click on the blue button that says “Create a custom search engine”. Now fill out the form. You’ll need a title and a short description for your search engine, plus a list of the sites you would like to add to your search. Once you’ve finished the form, click the next button and you are finished! You can now test your new search engine. If you think of additional sites you would like to add later on, you can always come back and tweak what you’ve done.

To learn more about creating a Google Custom Search, click here for instructions. You can also watch the quick introductory video below. If you're interested in learning about more advanced techniques, check out Google's detailed instructions here.

Tech Tool of the Week: Google Lit Trips

Would you like to bring the literature you teach to life? Then try this week's featured technology tool, Google Lit Trips! A Google Lit Trip is a free, downloadable Google Earth file that maps the journeys of characters in a book. Using a Google Lit Trip, students can actually travel along with the characters in a story to all of the places where the characters go. You can use Google Lit Trips to accompany the literature your students read in class and enable your students to have a much richer experience of the story!

In a Google Lit Trip, a book character's journey is plotted out on Google Earth, and a marker is placed on each location where the character goes. At each place mark you can find a wealth of supplementary information including relevant photos and videos, questions for discussion, and links to information about "real world" references made in that section of the story. Students can see where the characters are and that the characters are in real places...sometimes even interacting with real history! In this way kids can travel with the characters in a fully immersive, interactive, three-dimensional environment.

To get started, go to the Google Lit Trips website to see which books are available.  There is a section for K-5 literature as well as a separate one for middle grades and one for high school. When you find a book that you would like to use, look on the upper right corner of the page for a link in the format "Download titleofyourbook.kmz". Click on this link and the Google Lit Trip file will automatically download. You must have Google Earth installed on your computer in order to view this file. If you don't already have Google Earth installed on your computer, you may download it for free by clicking here.


Once you download the file, open it by double-clicking. Google Earth opens and immediately puts your Google Lit Trip on the surface of the globe! You can start exploring the character's journey by clicking on the place marks as the globe spins and starts you on your journey.

To learn more about using Google Lit Trips, click here for instructions, or watch the tutorial video below: