This week (except for Wednesday)Â I am dedicating my posts to sharing resources I learned about at TCEA in Austin last week. Â I think packing too much info into a blog post is overwhelming, so if you are craving more, feel free to check out my notes (which are not finished yet!) here.
So it turns out that finding a Phun Phriday post based on your notes from a conference about technology in education is a little bit harder than I anticipated. Â Because… Â education. Â And Phun Phriday posts are supposed to be (according to the rules I established for such posts) decidedly not educational.
I did find a note from the very first TCEA session I attended this year that could qualify as not really educational – unless you happen to teach at Le Cordon Bleu.  Unfortunately, since I don’t really like to cook, it doesn’t quite qualify as Phun, either.  But maybe you would disagree.
I learned from Richard Lombardo (@Rich_Lombardo) and Jerrad Barczyszyn (@rpdpjerrad) that the Google Search Tools aren’t always the same.  I usually use them when I’m looking for an image to determine copyright.  But I had no idea they would be helpful on the nights my husband works late and I’m stuck cooking dinner.
For example, go to Google and do a search for fried chicken. Â Then click on the Search Tools underneath. Â Now, you can filter the recipe results by anything from calories to cook time! Â By choosing “under 15 minutes” and “under 100 calories” I changed the number of results from over 50 million to just 1 recipe.
I’ll be only slightly more impressed when I can type in, “Make me some fried chicken,” and Google completes the task for me. Â But then I’ll probably just complain about how Google always leaves the kitchen so messy…