The two tools I chose were Google Translate and Google Trends. Google Translate is a great tool for trying to have a polite conversation with someone who speaks a little of your own language. My wife has friends from Ecuador who came to visit and neither of them spoke much English. We had a great time TRYING to communicate with Google Translate, and for the most part the translations were good enough that after some thought we could figure out what the other was trying to say. However, I would caution anyone using it for anything other than fun or ordering Chinese food. The translations are not true to the meaning of many words and phrases we take for granted.
Good Trends is fun because it allows you to see search trends over time. If you type in a celebrity name you can see exactly when they became popular because the search counts skyrocket. Its funny to see which countries are most interested in certain topics, and maybe a little disconcerting for others. Try typing in funny and weird things into google trends, you might be surprised who's been searching for it!
Uses for google translate would be few and far between, but google trends could be used to demonstrate to students how to extrapolate data from a graph. We may not have an exact date given to when Steve Jobs died, for example, but we can very clearly predict from the graph a rough time period in which that occurred.
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