Looking beyond the Google search engine

Academics often use the internet for research purposes, but with the vast amount of information on the web, it can often become a long tedious process. There are now many advanced ways to search the web to find relevant information quickly - check out Google's free tools below:

Google Suggest

Google 'show options'

Google Scholar

Google Advanced (search by file type)

Google Wave

Google Labs

Google Reader

Google Docs

For more explanation on these tools, click here

APT Extension Project seminar/workshop

Last week the APT team held an afternoon seminar/workshop with the Centre for Distance Education (CDE), University of London, on the benefits of using social tools in education.
The seminar involved an introduction to the Bloomsbury consortium, shared experiences from the APT project on applying social tools in educational contexts, followed by an interactive workshop in Google Docs.

The event attracted learning technologists, managers, teachers, directors, advisers from across a wide range of university's in London, where discussions were held about how collaborative tools might be used to enhance learning, teaching and working in their institutions.

For more information about APT Extension, and other projects that have emerged from the APT Project, please visit our APT Continuation Projects web page.

Google I/O Conference

The APT project has been working with Novoda.com on identifying suitable Google Android technologies to support mobile devices in Africa. As part of this collaboration, APT secured a small amount of funding from JISC to send Kevin McDonagh of Android out to the Google I/O Conference in California last week.

You can read a full review of Kevin's experiences on his blog.

If you would like to hear more about this early development work, please email nshort@rvc.ac.uk.

Nick