Google Tour Builder-Mind Blown!

Adventures in technology are much more exciting than I originally thought possible!  This week's adventures truly blew my mind!  I had to incorporate some of the adventures into my teaching because I just had to share!!!

Google Earth is an amazing program that lets you drill down to visit anywhere on earth and virtually see places up close and personal!  It's a virtual globe that gives access to anyone who will download the program to see satellite pictures, street views, and even 3D views of anywhere in the world, on the moon and on Mars!  It's almost too cool to be true!  Although everyone loves to go see their own houses, the potential for this tool is huge for individuals and educators!  Download the program and go have some mind blowing fun!  CHECK IT OUT!  And, for those who would rather watch a video...

I know what you're thinking, there has to be a limit to how amazing technology can be...but, there's more.  Google Earth extended itself and created an addition to create more amazing things in the world of virtual travel:  Google Tour Builder is an absolutely wonderful addition to Google Earth. Hoping to spread the excitement I am feeling, I'm providing a link to an educator's blog with a tour of the Donner party.  It will just give you a glimpse of the potential Google Tour Builder has for educators.  Mrs. Mooney's Teaching World

To get started, think of a story you would like to tell.  Next, check out the 5 cool things to do with Google Tour Builder.  It's very user friendly and will lead you step by step to creating your own tour.  I chose to create my tour about a book I helped a survivor of the holocaust write.  This was a fun project to complete and so easy to do!

My tour takes you on the journey Stan Kijowski, a holocaust survivor traveled while running from the Nazis and Russian soldiers.  Surviving the Holocaust.  After I am finished taking classes for my Master's Degree, I plan on writing a series of books based on letters my great-great grandfather wrote to his mother when he immigrated to America in the late 1800's.  The series will be called, Feather and Ink and believe me-there will be an extensive Google Tour to accompany the books!  The journey begins as he leaves his home in Germany, takes him across the ocean, travels through the United States until he settled in Kansas.  I can't wait to create the tour and show my Mom!!!  

I hope you catch the excitement and create your own tour!!

And Google just keeps on going....

Another week of learning some new things Google can do for me!  I'd often heard people discuss Google Tools but until you sit in the driver's seat and really explore-it's truly unfathomable.

Google Calendar is a one-stop shop for becoming organized and staying on top of things.  Combining my school calendar with the assistant-principal's calendar, the principal's calendar and my personal calendar-I can be assured I'm not going to miss anything important.  Setting your calendar up to send texts as reminders is almost so cool it's surreal!  The possibilities are many to incorporate other events from your Google Mail account.  To get a quick look at the power of combining Google Mail and Google Calendar click here.

Another cool tool(yes, I enjoyed the rhyme), is Google Story.  I enjoyed learning how to create a story and share it with the world.  The possibilities to use this with students is endless!  After tapping in to a few other peoples' ideas, my students will be creating Google Stories for parent-teacher conferences.  The characters will be themselves, their folks and me.  They've already created smart goals so now I'm going to challenge them to take it to a new level.  On Google Story, they will create the dialogue they foresee as they tell their parents what goals they've set.  I think it will be the bright spot during parent-teacher conferences!  To learn how to use it click here. Or, if you want to dig in and just play with creating one try this.

Google is amazing.  I'm astonished to discover everything within this amazing website,  If you are curious about how big Google really is and what the future may hold; watch this video-prepare to have your mind blown!

Take a spin with GoogleDrive!

Google Drive has so many benefits, it is difficult to choose even a few of the most important ones. It gives you all the same features of Microsoft but it's web-based. Within the website, there are places to create and save documents, presentations, spreadsheets, forms, and drawings. It also allows you to create folders and become more organized than previously imaginable! Auto-saving will help anyone like me who struggles to remember to do that when it matters most. Google has created and continues to improve upon some tough competition for Microsoft plus Drop Box and other online storage systems. Working within Google Drive as a norm will enable me to work from home or school without dragging my work computer home. The only limitations might fall in the area of the presentation. It doesn't seem to be as user-friendly as Power Point. However, I will have to give it more time and get some experience before I make that a final opinion. Also, it is imperative to remember to name files within Google Drive or it will become unmanageable. Google Docs is amazing and maybe one of my favorites because more than one person can edit so it becomes a great way to collaborate. The possibilities are spinning around in my head for future projects and having students work with others who aren't in their block. It would be an interesting test and seems to be a real-world unpredictable problem for them to tackle. The Google Classroom looks amazing as well. I currently use Edmodo but am going to try a couple of assignments in Google Classroom because each student in our school has a Google Mail account. It seems like the connections will be stronger. Like I said before, there are too many amazing features to pick just a few. Check out this YouTube video to get started and explore-prepare to be amazed!

I am thrilled to have learned how to create a custom search.  With Career and College Readiness Standards, there have been a lot of discussion about relevance.  This new skill is not only relevant to my teaching, it's also timely.  My students will be researching the attacks of 9/11 this week.  My custom search is EXACTLY what I needed to assist them and be assured that they were on task and getting good information.  There are times when I set a group of twenty-eight 8th graders loose on a quest on the internet and do my circling around the room to monitor if they are truly researching but know there are sites I don't really want them to access.  This feature allows my students to search inside the websites I have reviewed and know to be safe.  It makes me happy, makes the tech department happy and I have to think the students will be happy to have one step of the process already complete!  To try out my search engine, type in any question you may have about the official reports or the conspiracy theory of 9/11.  Look in the next post to see if the students were happy about this feature!  

Google mania has begun in my head!  Who knew there were sooo many cool tricks within this monster of a search engine/website/social network.  I want to know all of the bells and whistles well so I can be super-effective with my time and in my teaching.  With that said, I realize if I can learn and incorporate a few things into my working knowledge each week, I will be gaining.  And, I know where to come back to learn and incorporate more later!

The features that gave me the AHA! moments this week were many...learning how to search was eye-opening!  There are so many ways that Google has made this feature user-friendly!  With the know-how, the information one can glean is unlimited!  With just a few words, it is possible to have information concerning movies, weather, sports scores, restaurants serving a favorite type of food-unbelievable! Also, searching for a certain file type will be very useful when it comes to create lesson plans or presentations in the classroom.  Google books searches,searching by reading level and narrowing down searching to only one site are all easy ways to incorporate technology into my classroom on a daily basis.  To learn how to search in many different ways, click here.here.

Within Google mail, there are some amazing features too.  Chatting with others who are online could be quite helpful to communicate with co-workers who are across the building and schedules never allow time to meet face to face.  Setting up a calendar on Google that allows dates and events to be loaded into the calendar with just a click is an amazing feature to keep all important events in one place.  Creating a custom inbox and prioritizing the emails coming in will also help with time management.  I wanted to sing, "Hallelujah!" when I learned about the undo sent email feature as well as the notification that an email was sent to the wrong person.  Lifesaving features when we get too busy and need someone to have our backs-Google is it!  Here's a video to illustrate many of the amazing features inside Google Mail.

Google is trying to make even the most random of us organized and efficient!