What is a Google Alert?

Google Alerts lets you set up an automatic email "alert" when something new on the web is posted about the search terms or topics you are looking for.  I've heard a few things about this before, but until I read a post today about a teacher who has set up an alert for "Google Earth", I hadn't really check it out.  On the Alert website, it says you can, monitor a developing news story or keep current on specific subjects.  This sounds like a great way to keep up on political events for Civics or like our health classes are doing right now, researching and learning about the effects of Tobacco. By setting up an alert, you can have just about anything you are interested in, pop right into your inbox!  

So let's give it a try...(I'm typing as I try this) I'm going to http://www.google.com/alerts.  I'm searching for "Google Earth + Math".  I've heard Google Earth is a good tool to use in math classes, but I haven't seen too many actual lessons and am curious about how we can incorporate it and have more "real world" problems.  Once I type that in, then I can choose the type of material I want to search for, whether it be news, blogs, websites, videos, etc. I'm going to choose "Comprehensive".  

Then I need to choose how often I want to receive alerts: as-it-happens, once a day, or once a week.  I'll start with once a day and see if I'm being bombarded with emails or not.  Next, I need to choose email length, either 20 or 50 results.  I'll got with 20 for now.  Then I have it delivered to my gmail account.  It's that easy!


I'll see how it goes, I'm really excited to see what happens and how often I might be using this feature.