Google Alerts: This feature allows you to keep up with important topics such as your favorite sports team or local news. I signed up to receive a daily e-mail news alert.
Google Calendar: I like this feature to share upcoming department test/project dates with the entire school (and parents). This will help to increase communication between everyone. Now getting others to use it is the difficult part.
Picasa Web Album: This is very similar to Flickr and it even contains a map feature similar to Mappr. I like the Where in the World game on Picasa, it was fun to play around with. I wish I could filter the pictures on the game to contain certain tags such as, "National Monuments."
iGoogle: This would be exciting to use in the classroom. Having each student create their own personalized page to assist with research would be helpful. Each student can have a space where they can work on and publish their projects from their classes. Having access to Google Reader, Google Docs, Google Calendar, Gmail, and other services all on one page helps to eliminate confusion while making everything more organized and efficient for student use. Here is a link to my page: http://www.google.com/ig
Google Scholar: Hopefully this website will give the students the necessary Google fix they seem to crave when conducting research. No matter how hard we promote the district databases to the students, somehow they still rather Google a topic. I really like this search engine since it automatically removes all of the unnecessary junk from the results.
Google Earth: We have used this in my class for map uses. A lot of times you'll see the students checking out various places on satellite maps such as the school or their home. There are several features I like about Google Earth. First, you can save your searches to show all your classes and eliminate unnecessary downtime. Second, Google Earth allows you to search more than just streets as you can explore places such as, Mars, the Moon, and the ocean. From the history perspective, I like the historical imagery that allows the users to see how a specific location changes over time. Science classes can use this feature to view the impact development has on the land over time.
Google Docs: I am familiar with this since we used Google docs to lesson plan as a team during summer school. I like the fact that everyone can edit the document and we can plan and communicate cross-curricular even with different off periods. This really helps with grade-level cross curricular planning or planning as an entire department (6-8th grade) since everyone can share their lessons and ideas. The students can use it to edit several projects for various classes. I like that they have one document that they can use to work on their project. This will make cross-curricular projects easier to plan and create.
No comments:
Post a Comment