I was so excited to learn that a friend of mine got a job with the Google office in Atlanta. She confirmed the rumors about the ever-engaging working environment and offered me a tip about Blackle, an energy-saving custom search engine powered by Google. The browser turns your screen black which saves Watt hours. So far Blackle claims to have saved 825,311.665 Watt hours. Thanks Kelly…I’m holding out for an Atlanta Google t-shirt!
My fourth grade class launched a geography study today, beginning with an investigation into our Junior Geographer atlases. A study of longitude and latitude will accompany discussions about continents, hemispheres, landforms, etc., and a colleague wondered if we could incorporate Google Earth into our plans. What a great thought; once inside the program, every movement of the mouse produces a different geographic address. I think I’ll encourage my students to find the geographic coordinate for their homes, our school (and see how much of a discrepancy there is between student findings), and one free choice location. My pie-in-the-sky goal is to eventually teach my students how to add photos from their summer vacations to Google Maps, offering their photography skills as resources for others searching Google Earth.
While planning my latitude/longitude study, I came across the Google Earth Gallery a resource filled with content that teachers can use with Google Earth. A couple of my favorite gallery entries were: Median Ages in California (relates to our current math unit about information and data), Magellan’s Circumnavigation, and although I couldn’t get it to work properly, a file displaying 86 football stadiums from around the world. How fun for our elementary athletes!
Wow, it has been a while. How do teachers have time to keep up with their blogging lives?
I enjoyed my “play” time with Google Docs & Spreadsheets as part of my task for Thing 20. I actually delved into the spreadsheets function and put together the first draft of a document that will hopefully complement the curricular calendar that my 4th grade team has already created for our social studies teaching. My goal is that we use the online spreadsheet to collect and link to primary sources, videos, podcasts, articles, etc. that correspond to the content we focus on through Joy Hakim’s A History of Us, Books 1 and 2. As the year progresses, I hope that we modify and pare down the spreadsheet so that it eventually contains just the sources that are most applicable to the content and more interesting to the students. That’s where team collaboration comes in!
I found the Google Spreadsheets to be easy to use, very similar to Microsoft Excel. I had to seek help on how to create links within cells, but other than that didn’t have trouble putting my thoughts together on the page. When I was ready to invite the members of my team to view the document, I loved how Google allowed me to type up a message to be delivered with the document. That way, my colleagues didn’t receive an invitation to collaborate on a document and think, “What is this?” Also, it was nice to discover that non-gmail users are able to create a Google (not a gmail) account and colloborate in Google Docs; see video:
Other than what I used it for, I can see that the Google Docs & Spreadsheets tool has a myriad of uses. Here are a few I could think of:
Planning a party: Create a Google Doc to hash out who will plan, bring, bake, do what…
Build a class birthday calendar: Allow the students to enter their birthday in and see how the document changes
Monthly Book Club: Invite members to select the month they would like to host, enter the book they’ve chosen, and post directions to their home in a spreadsheet
Committee Meeting Updates: Choose a person to post a summary of the committee’s discussion following each meeting; keep all committees under different tabs on the spreadsheet so everyone can see how other committees are progressing
Survey Students: Ask students what they know about an upcoming topic of study to assess prior knowledge and/or interest level
Don’t forget to check out all the Google docs templates available! (or see previous post)
Thank you to Cool Cat Teacher Vicki Davis who “twittered” (is that even the right term?) about new templates for Google Docs and Spreadsheets that were released today. I like the collaborative feel of Google Docs (especially after learning how to create a survey in Google Docs with Lucy Gray at iSummit!), and I’m thinking that in many ways it could be useful for my fourth graders–and grade level team–in the fall.
It’s always great to have completed a technology conference. I leave feeling satisfied and inspired. This year’s iSummit was no different. Of course it didn’t hurt that everyone who attended from my school walked away with a fantastic door prize (an iPod Touch, 2 Higher Ground laptop cases, and Laptop Lojack)! As I looked back through my notes and the projects I started in Nashville, I thought it might be nice to do a quick post about the top three things I learned and plan to use in my classroom as a result of iSummit:
One of the coolest tips that I took away from The Coalition of Lighthouse Schools iSummit this year came from Lucy Gray in a session about all the educational tools that Google offers teachers. Lucy’s class “Enhancing Your Digital Workflow” taught me all about Google Earth, Google Apps for Educators, Google Reads, and Google Sky (the latter two were new to me). In Google Docs and Spreadsheets, there is a function available that allows users to find the answers to questions such as “What is the population of Atlanta?” or “Where was Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. born?” simply by entering an “entity” and an “attribute” into a cell in Google spreadsheets. Check it out! Here is a complete list of what Google offers.
Dr. Carl Owens from Tennessee Tech taught us all about “Cool Tools for Classroom Use. Along with various devices and assistive technologies that teachers can use in the classroom, he told us about “Cable in the Classroom,” a Web resource with educational online video, a list of classroom-friendly recordings, parent tips, podcasts, lesson plans, etc. You’ll be impressed by all the information under the Cable Resources for Learninglink.
Julene Reed showed us how students can use Photo Booth to superimpose personalized backdrops behind photos and videos. By the way, did you know you can take video through Photo Booth?! In Julene’s session on iMovie ‘08, we were using Photo Booth version 2.0.2 to capture our video, and with it we could drag photos from iPhoto into Photo Booth and apply them as our video backdrops. Be sure you have advanced to the fourth page of the Photo Booth effects if you want to try it; once there, you will see empty cells into which you can drag your own photos. I think it’s awesome–so simple!
Thank you to all the Apple Distinguished Educators who gave of their time to teach us: Julene Reed, Lucy Gray, Ty Richardson, Cathleen Richardson, Joe Morris, Carl Owens, Larry Anderson, etc. We enjoyed every minute, and we’ll see you next year!
