30 in 30: Day 17 - Searching Google Drive more Effectively

Day 17 in the 30 in 30 series will take a look at how to search Google Drive more effectively.  One of the nice features of Drive is the ability to use Google's search box to find your Docs, Sheets, Slides or any file that you have saved in your Drive.  And while most know that this search box exists, not many use all of the search features that are available. Rather than just searching for what you think that name of the file is that someone shared with you.....or was it something that you created?  Hmmm.....didn't find it.  Maybe I called it something else?  Did I even save it here?  These are all questions that I hear when helping teachers.  Let's refine what we are looking for to help narrow those search results from Drive.  You do this by clicking on the down arrow in the Drive search box.  This will bring up a dialog box that will allow you to specifiy what you are looking for and bring back more specific and relevant results.  The image below is an example of what you will find.  If you are looking for the video to help explain searching Google Drive, you can find it here.

30 in 30: Day 4 - Searching a Site

Day 4 in the 30 in 30 series is going to share a trick that I learned a few years ago while teaching a Digital Citizenship unit to seventh graders.  We were doing a scavenger hunt where students had to search a website to find key words or phrases and answer the corresponding questions.  The one site that we had to search {ThinkUKnow} had so many pages to look through it became more frustrating than productive.  Through the frustration came the discovery of the "site:" search tool.  Using the power of Google, you can search for any term or string of words from a particular site.  Rather than just searching Google's millions of indexed webpages, if I know what I am looking for and the website that I want to find it on, I can use the "site:" in the Google search box before what I am trying to search for.  Was super useful for us in class as we knew what site we were trying to search and the terms that we were looking for, just didn't know where to go.  We let Google bring us back just the results from the site that we were looking for.  Pretty awesome search trick.  Click Here to watch the video on how to use the "site:" search to refine your search results to a specific website.