Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “Google Trends Tutorial”.
This short video tutorial is about one of the lesser-known google tools and it’s called Google Trends and even though this may not be their most popular tool, it is one that I appreciate very much and I don’t use it every week, but when I need it really, There’S nothing better that I know of to give me this kind of information. So what is Google Trends about what it is it’s a way for people to get a sense of what is trending of what people are interested in? What people are searching for? What they’re tweeting about what they’re talking about what stories are trending, so that’s why they call it Google Trends and you can find it by just going to google.com slash Trends. This is what it looks like and you can see right now: who’s trending, what’s trending, and if you want to learn more about it, you can go ahead and click on it and it brings up sometimes stories related to it, and it also shows kind of a History over time of the interest in that topic, person or thing and there’s often related queries that are trending and things like that related topics, even interest maps. Okay, so you can see what areas of the world what areas of the country are more interested in this topic and which ones are less interested. I’M going to go back, though, because you know this parts interesting to me, but I rarely go here to see. What’S currently trending instead, what I do is I go up to the top here and I click where it says, explore topics and I type in a topic – so let’s say coke okay type in coke and it shows over the last four years, the interest level in Coke and then next, I’m going to click on this plus sign to compare coke with another product how about Pepsi? Okay. So now I can see a comparison, it’s hard to judge one thing against itself right.
You need something to compare it against, and so here you can see the interest level at this point right here, Pepsi was actually more searched. There was a little bit more interest in Pepsi than Coke, but for the most part, there’s more interest in Pope’s. If I go down the page, I can see interest by region. So apparently Pepsi is much more popular in South America, or at least people are more interested in it, apparently than it is in North America and different things like that. You can really get some insights about things by doing this about the world and about products and concepts and people. So how is this useful for teachers and for students? Well, it might be useful in reports and things like that, but from an educational technology perspective there’s another reason I think it’s useful for teachers – and that is you know there are so many educational technology websites, tools and technologies out there right now. It’S sometimes hard to know which ones to adopt, and it’s really a simple decision about which ones to adopt, but one factor to take into account might be the popularity of the product, and I know, what’s popular, isn’t necessarily what’s good or what’s the best. I know that’s definitely the case, but let me just give you an example: let’s say you’re interested in using a web 2.0 service that helps you to add questions to educational videos. Okay, here are two examples of those kinds of services.
One is called Edie puzzle, edpuzzle comm, and I have a video tutorial about this wonderful product. This great website that I highly recommend that you watch to see why this is a worthwhile tool and then there’s another similar tool called play posit. I believe it used to be called Edie cannon, but it’s now play positive and this is also a great tool, but there’s always pluses and minuses.
There’S always something that makes something better or worse or you know, there’s different factors, and it very well may be that this one is better or it might be that this one is better, but one factor is what are people using? What are they searching for? What are they interested in right now, so I could do a search for Edie puzzle and hit enter and see the interest level over time. Okay, so no interest, it probably didn’t exist at this point and then there’s a little blip and then it starts to pick up and you can see it gets a lot bigger. Now it’s hard to judge this without comparing it to something else.
So I’m going to go in and type in play pause. It now play pause. It changed its name fairly recently.
So this isn’t a fair comparison, but you can see that this is probably the moment when they changed their name from Edie cannon to play posit and then it’s starting to kind of get a little bit more interest. Now a while back. There was a third option called zaption: okay, so I’ll do a search for zaption and a lot of people like to zaption better than Edie puzzle, and I like option but Edie puzzle was always my favorite and I kind of stuck with that one. For the most part, well, you can see in this trend line here that Edie puzzle pretty much has always been the top choice as far as interest level. Okay, there might have been a point or two where it wasn’t quite the top choice, but Edie puzzle definitely is dominating in interest level all three of these tools, and so this is something to take into account. Okay, in many cases, there’s a good reason why one tool has more interest than the other, so something to take into account.
Now I just removed by clicking on these three dots and clicking remove. I just removed Edie puzzle, so you can see the comparison between play. Posit and zaption and you’ll see that zaption was much much more popular and then all of a sudden it crashed and has gone down almost to zero, and that’s because my understanding is that zaption is no longer in service, so kind of an interesting thing. You could use this for history, you could use it for learning about pop culture and and learning about politics and all sorts of different things, but it’s also useful for what I just said for judging educational technology based on the interest level at this time. So I hope that’s useful thanks for watching and please consider subscribing to my youtube channel for more videos about technology for teachers and students and look for a new video, at least every Monday.
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