Friday, May 24th
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One of the several unpopular assignments I force upon my students is the Sophomore Speech. I am capitalizing Sophomore Speech because it has become a thing at our school … a proper thing. Every single one of my 10th grade students is required to write a personal essay and convert it into a speech to be delivered in front of the entire school during our assembly period we call Break.
I’m in my third year teaching English in a classroom with a cart of ten netbooks running Windows XP. I am so grateful to have them, and my students use them at least every other day. However, as an aging operating system, XP runs slowly and is much more complex than we need. The start time is long and we have varied success connecting to the wireless network. On the recommendation of Colin Matheson, an IT specialist at Carmel Unified School District, I installed Ubermix.
While Drive is adding more and more formatting options all the time, it simply doesn’t have all of the formatting capabilities of Office documents. And while Office is adding collaborative features, they’re definitely not there.
I recently posted this on my Google+ profile, and it has generated a lot of activity. More than anything else I’ve done. Last week I had a student tell me that he forgot his assignment at home. I asked him, “did you create it using your Google Drive account?” He had, so we just grabbed one of the school’s computers, brought it up, and he shared it with me.
This week Chris and the crew look at more Chrome experiments, improvements to docs, and the mysterious beast called “Drive”. Lots of Chrome tips and tricks and some fresh ideas for teaching vocabulary.
Kevin Brookhouser and Fred Delventhal, cover many things SEARCH including how you can get a your very own Google Power Searcher Certificate, determine any actress/actor’s “Bacon Number” and a look at what’s coming for search education. We’ll show you how you can have the Transformers visit your school, how to display your android device on your computer screen and how keep time with your Professional Learning Network using a world clock. All this and more on this week’s Google Educast.
This week on the Google Educast:Kevin Brookhouser, Fred Delventhal, Sean Williams, and Diane Main discuss Docs on tablets, YouTube for teachers, discussions in Google Spreadsheets, the next Google Teacher Academy, and much more.
As the new school years begins join hosts Chris Betcher, Fred Delventhal and Sean Williams as they discuss the latest news from the Google world of education, including turn-by-turn navigation for cyclists, Google+ improvements for Apps customers, cool things you can do with Google Reader bundles, and the highs and lows of 2-factor authentication.
This week on the Google Educast: Fred Delventhal, Kevin Brookhouser, Sean Williams, and Chris Betcher take us through a bevy of tools and extensions that will help out the classroom, especially if you have a tablet device like and iPad or Nexus 7. This show really delves into the conundrum some educators have when collaborating on an iDevice.
This week on the Google Educast: Diane Main, Kevin Brookhouser, Sean Williams, and Chris Betcher are getting excited about the new school year (in the U.S), anyway, and Chris Betcher gives us his tips from the Australia side of things. Google for Education has so many tools to start off the school year; let’s see what the GCTs have to offer!
