GoogleApps

=Invention for Secondary Level=

Geoff Grimmer : Google Apps
Google is a big player on the web these days, and some of the coolness they exude has been resonating with inventive teachers.

So google.video is swiftly becoming a valuable way to expressively communicate your ideas or perspective on a topic through the web. Video remixes are now fairly accessible through intuitive programs like iMovie, allowing students to reinvent or challenge an inferior paradigm by establishing a new meaning for an older video clip. Catching good video has never been easier with hand held devices that many folks carry with them. Voilà, you are a film producer...now, what do you believe in?

At google.earth, teachers can connect souls to the collective soul by dancing in between street view and plane view as they gain scalable perspective on historical events ...that matter to informed young citizenry. How did Afghanistan bankrupt the Soviet economy? Or more recently, will Afghanistan bankrupt the US economy? Zoom in to see natural resource removal, and out to see how far it is from Kabul to Kentucky. In to see a mountain bike path you might try or out to see where Chinese satellites are whizzing by. Take a literature tour or design your own.

Google.sketch is a valuable tool for any young architect, and has plenty of room to enhance a physics or industrial arts lesson. Geometry students can be asked to perform more elaborate constructions, art students can recreate a relevant sculpture, skateboarders can design more elaborate environments. If you are studying Colorado History, zoom in on the Opera House in Leadville and measure its floor dimensions, paste t hat into sketch and begin to construct a model using photos from google.images to estimate the width of the Victorian trim. If your sketch is accurate enough, the folks at google will upload your construction onto google.earth for the world to see. Google.maps will allow you to check for 'no parking' signs along the street of any city PRIOR to arrival.

Another authentic audience can be found within google.blogs which is increasingly chill and often heady in its discussions...so do your research before you start testifying...at google.scholar or just at google, using 'advanced search' to pimp your results. If you have the time, mess around with google.sites for 40-60 minutes. Super money interface with easy steps to develop yourself on the web. Also has an 'analytics' section that gives you data about your visitors, and develop meaning from data as a classroom. Sites also interfaces seamlessly with google.survey which replaces survey monkey as the way to gain immediate feedback from parents or kids or colleagues. It can be used live and in real time or as a tool to inform practice or an interest inventory at the beginning of school. Math teachers might use data from their students to facilitate math discussions, rather than studying arbitrary data from a cheeeeesy textbook.

If you have parents who habla rien English, reach out to them with google.translate as your best buddy. Send home a compliment about a kid in the fall and see where that gets ya. Send a few more and you may see parent involvement increase! History teachers can analyze original documents in their original language...and interpret them with kids in a brand new way! How can we study the bible without knowing Hebrew?!...trust the editor- right. Translate P. Friere for a cluster mtg. Or bring in the perfect evidence with google.books, allowing you to reference a diverse collection of great writers with your kids. Did someone say 'money saver'? Kids are comfortable in these domains, but many teachers are struggling with where to jump in. Imagine a school that only uses paper for wiping stuff.

Google.alerts is a good way to filter all the info for some of the info. Set up an RSS feed that interfaces with your gmail. Start with NSTA, but know there is more! Alerts represents a tool to be a more effective and efficient digger. A digger, as denoted most bodaciously by the late E. Grogan, is ...umm...somebody who can open 7 browser tabs in 3 minutes and swiftly gather a specific piece of knowledge, or begin an exciting web journey through a topic that they dig. As classroom leaders, we must teach our kids to dig, and look for ways to improve our own dig. You dig? If you want to control the dig, build your own google.engine...will you build it in your own image?

Rather get a structured training on these tools? Visit google.edutraining or visit Molly the Google ninja at followmolly.com. Share your coolest findings with folks on staff and across district. Have fun and remember: respectful tasks!

Lesson plans are already created for you to tailor to your needs at