Google Reader in the Classroom

As a first grade teacher, the thought of using Google Reader with my students was difficult to figure out at first. Not many children sites publish daily news and information that students that are six and seven can easily digest. I did find however that I could use Google Reader to find lesson ideas that I could use with my students! Many websites dedicated to sharing lessons can be added to Google Reader. For example, I receive lesson ideas from the Teaching Pre K-8 website almost every day through Google Reader. The great part of this is that Google Reader will also make recommendations for similar websites based on your subscribed sites. This is a great way to have the best content delivered to you instead of the completing an endless search!

TeacherTube - create a google account

TeacherTube - create a google account

Gaggle is a service that allows you to create managed email accounts for students in your classroom. You can use Gaggle and Google together to create Google accounts for your students! The video above shows a  student with a Gaggle account how to sign up for a Google account.

Publish from Google Docs to your Blog

One of the great things about using Google tools is that they integrate fairly well with each other. Google owns the company Blogger which is the platform that this blog is created on. You can use Google Docs to directly post to your Blogger account! To accomplish this simply log into your Google Docs account and create your post. When you are complete, select the Publish button. You will be given the option to publish to a blog. You will be given the option to select the blog you would like to publish to and once you are set-up, your post will magically appear on your blog when you are complete! You can now easily publish without ever visiting your blog page and logging in. Google Docs publish to Blog option works best with Blogger but it will also work with other blogging platforms such as WordPress. If you have Blogger account give it a try and let me know how it works for you!

In you classroom you can create a blog and allow your students to type their reflections and other classroom activities in Google Docs. You can then have them publish their work to the classroom blog and have a single place where parents can go and view the work of their child in your class. Wouldn't this be much easier than attaching twenty documents to a website? Let me know what you think!

Why use Google Docs Video

Photo from: http://docs.google.com/

http://www.commoncraft.com/video-googledocs

Above is a link to a great video on why you should use Google Docs and not email to share and edit files. Collaboration requires everyone to "be on the same page." If you send a document via email to several collaborators to make changes to however you now have several copies of that document that need to be combined into one. Google Docs eliminates needless redundancy and creates one document that several collaborators can edit.

In a classroom environment for example, we can use this newfound collaboration to instantly update or give students feedback on documents they are working on, as they are working on them! The possibilities are endless!

Google Docs Offline

Image from: http://gears.google.com/

One the the greatest strengths of Google Docs is ironically also one of its greatest weakness. The ability to edit a document online at any computer, any time is great until you no longer have online access. Google is working to solve this problem using a tool called Google Gears. Google Gears is still in development but when complete it will allow you to view your documents in Google Docs even if there is no internet connection!

You can use Google Gears with both Internet Explorer and Firefox on a PC and Firefox on a Mac. More information about Google Gears can be found here and here.

gDocsBar for Firefox

http://www.webware.com/8301-1_109-9859665-2.html

I found a link to this great add-on for those who use Firefox and Google Docs! You can manage your docs from a sidebar instead of an extra tab window. More information can be found at the link above.

The picture on the right is credited to Sandosh Vasudevan and taken from the website: http://www.gdocsbar.com/

If you are a Firefox user try it out and let us know what you think!

Creating Bookmarks in Google

Every have a website you love and added to your favorites in your internet browser? What happens when you are not using your computer at home and want to visit that link? You cannot!  Having your favorites or bookmarks on just one computer is just not practical anymore with the different computers you can use at work and at home. Google provides a bookmarks service that allows you to save your bookmarks online and access them wherever you are, no matter what computer you are using. 

Getting Started:

Google provides its bookmark service at: http://www.google.com/bookmarks

You will need a Google Account.  Once you log in you will see the following screen:

To add bookmarks to your Google account, simply follow the directions above and drag the icon to links area. You can then click on the words "Google Bookmark" and it will automatically add the page you are viewing to your Google Bookmarks online. You will get the chance to add keywords, or tags to your website to make it easier to find later. 

There are other websites that allow you to save bookmarks online but if you are already using Google for all your other information it may be easier for you to store your bookmarks here also. Bookmarks on Google are for your personal use only. There is currently no way to share pages you bookmark.

 If you have bookmarks already saved to your personal browser, you do not have to save them again to add them to Google Bookmarks! You can import them. More information can be found here. 

FETC Google Tools Session

It was great to see all of the educators who attended our presentation
at the Florida Educators Technology Conference! The group was very
interactive! We have much more to share than what we were able to
mention at the conference and will be updating this blog to share the
information. Check back often!

Google For Educators Discussion Group

Google has a great discussion area for teacher who are using Google Apps in their classroom. You can view a lesson sharing discussion group here.

A Quick Trip to the Park

Here is a quick tutorial you can use to create an appointment in Google Calendar. You can use the steps here to share any calendar items you create!

A Quick Trip to the Park