Research for a busy teacher

Google alerts are a useful way of collecting information on a regular basis, without much effort on your part. You can decide how frequent you want the searches to be returned to you.

Google Alerts and its related Blog Search Gadget are extremely useful research tools that require no day-to-day attention. Set up the search terms and either use a second email account or a filter for your main account and the results will be delivered to you even though you are not actively searching.

The first step is to get to the Google alerts page, a Google search is an obvious way.
Put in the search terms, comma separated and pick whether you want to search websites, blogs or both (comprehensive)
If you put your search term in http://www.google.com/blogsearch then not only do you get the result, but at the bottom
You get the option to add the search as a ‘Gadget’ to your ‘iGoogle’ home page. This means whenever you open Google the most recent results of the search are there, if they are of interest you can follow them up.