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| Google Is Not a Spellchecker! | | By Nate Heasley for Screenager Central |
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Let's face it; we all get a little lazy sometimes. Whether it's because you had two too many White Castle burgers for lunch, or just don't feel like an all-evening homework marathon. Whether you're inherently lazy, or got that way through lots and lots of practice, there are some awesome Web tools that can help speed up your schoolwork (while still allowing you to do a great job), so you can get back to Star Wars Galaxies faster than you can say "Queen Padmé Amidala." |
You know you do it: use Google as a spellchecker. It wasn't designed for this purpose, but we've all resorted to it -- typing in the word and looking for the number of hits you get back and whether Google asks: "Did you mean?" with the correct spelling hyperlinked. Just don't rely on Google too much for this purpose because not every web site has an English major on staff. That's what your word processing program is for! If you type in different guesses, your wordpro program will do a much better job of eventually coming up with the correct spelling.
Did you know that Google is also a calculator? If you type in, say: 12 * 15 + 0.5 it will return: (12 * 15) + 0.5 = 180.5. Check out their calculator help page for all of the mathematical expressions you can use. Google can also be used as a dictionary (by entering "define: [word to define]"), a phone book (by entering first name, last name, city), a language translator (see details on the Features page link above) and a bunch of other things.
When you're looking for source materials for a school project, goodness knows it can be time consuming to trudge to the local library. Luckily, most of the books that teachers want you to read are old (or the "classics" as they call 'em) -- and that means they can frequently be found, for free, on the Internet. Project Gutenberg is an online library full of texts from old (mostly dead) authors whose books have passed into the public domain. They can be downloaded, distributed, and read freely on your PC, handheld, or printed out if you'd like to kill a lot of trees.
Another great resource is Amazon's new "Search Inside a Book" feature. It allows you to actually search within many books they carry for specific text, and you can read several pages around any particular quote. This is handy if you don't want to buy a book just for one or two quotes that you need, or if you've already returned a book to the library but need to refer back to a specific page. Amazon also has their new answer to Google, called A9. It combines a Web-wide search engine with their Search Inside a Book feature so you can scoop up tons of info with a single search.
Wikipedia is an amazing free online encyclopedia. The entire massive collection of information, which includes everything from albacore to zebra fish, is contributed and approved by people writing about their area of expertise, so the information is much more reliable than you'd find on some random Web page.
If you're too lazy to even bother reading (shame on you!), check with the new Telltale Weekly, a site that's making audio books out of pretty much everything that Project Gutenberg has in its library. And if it isn't there yet, make sure to at least check Netflix or Blockbuster -- if the book is a classic, it's probably been turned into a movie at some time.
Of course, when cruising the Web for homework help you may be tempted to...er...quote material extensively without revealing the source. Keep in mind that you're not the only one with access to these resources. If anyone wants to check your work for plagiarism, all they have to do is type a quoted passage into Google or Amazon to see if it comes up anywhere else. Your teachers probably frequent an anti-plagiarism site for educators called -- duuuh! -- plagiarism. So it's not worth the risk when, thanks to all of the amazing and easy accessible Web resources out there, you have a mother load of great reference material to inspire you.
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