How Do You Get Your Google Glow On?

My colleague, Jodie, and I got an e-mail the other day from the organizers of the Virtual School Society's Annual Spring Conference saying that they did have room for us after all to give our presentation Get Your Google Glow On and could we still do it? Even though the conference is next week (not a lot of prep time), Jodie and I are good sports and said yes.


Image: google_logo by keso

Nervous About the Presentation
Yes, I've been teaching for awhile now, but for some reason I'm more comfortable talking to an auditorium of high school kids than I am speaking to a group of my peers. Added to that, the last time I did a presentation at a conference was when I was wrapping up my MSc in Biology about 13 years ago; hopefully distance learning educators are less ruthless than grad students and post-docs who are trying to make a name for themselves!

Collaboration & Communication
Jodie and I are presenting on some of the many on-line tools that Google offers. We're highlighting Google Notebook, Google Docs, and Google Calendar. The presentation is aimed at beginners who have not used these tools before. We're planning on focusing on how these tools can allow for increased collaboration and better communication.

How We Use The Tools
Since September we've been using Google Calendar to post relevant due dates, exam dates etc. We created a separate calendar for each grade and students can subscribe to their calendar or just view them on our website (see the grade 9 calendar here). I teach at a distributed learning school where many of our students are working asynchronously. The calendar 'deadlines' have been very helpful to let students know if they are on track to finishing their courses on time.

Jodie and I use Notebook to book mark sites we want to show the students in a particular unit. We've just been working on a series of lessons on hatching duck eggs; Jodie set up a notebook and shared it with me so that I could add links as well. I also use Notebook to organize the links for my Elluminate Live! sessions.

As for Google Docs, I've been preparing my Elluminate Live! lesson presentations using the Presentation tool. To demonstrate how to solve Applications of Math 10 questions I set up a spreadsheet in Google Docs and walked a student through the process on-line. We're also starting to get students to collaborate with each other using the Documents software.

How Do You Use These Google Tools?
Do you use any of these three Google tools with students or colleagues? If so, would you be willing to share how they have been effective for you? If so I'd love to hear from you!

Post Script
I'm posting this using the Blog Posting option in Flock. I'm curious as to how this will work out as I'm new to using Flock.

Added after posting--The Flock upload worked fairly well, except that none of my font formats were uploaded (italics and bold).

Blogged with the Flock Browser



Tags: Google, Google Docs, Google Notebook, Google Calendar, VSS conference, collaboration, communication, tools

Tools Are Important (but they're still just tools)

In April the VSS 2008 Annual Spring Conference - Learning: Anyone, Anytime, Anywhere is happening in Vancouver and I was pumped about a session that I wanted to do with my colleague, Jodie. I went to the conference last year for the first time and I found it to be wonderful Pro-D and a great networking opportunity.

What Jodie and I wanted to present on were a bunch of cool Google applications that we stumbled upon this summer during our self-directed Pro-D. One of them, Google Docs, is a great little fairly basic on-line word processing tool. What makes it impressive is that multiple users can work on the same document at the same time and go back and view edits that have been made. It could be a very useful tool if you have students collaborating together on a project, or if you are collaborating with a peer (as Jodie and I have done).

We also discovered Google Calendar, which we have used with great success. You can do a whole lot of cool things with Google Calendar such as allowing others to subscribe to your calendar or you can post your calendar(s) to web pages. For example, check out the calendar on our grade 10 web page. We have been using the calendars to post deadlines and other important dates. Students and their parents have been finding the calendars quite useful. After these two great finds, I decided to check out More Google Products. From here I discovered Google Notebook, Blogger, Gmail, Google Talk, Google Reader, and much more.

So, basking in our Google Glow, Jodie and I thought we should definitely present on this at the VSS conference. But now I'm having second thoughts. Don't get me wrong, I love these Google apps. I use Notebook everyday, I have almost committed to switching all of my personal e-mail over to Gmail, I rely on Google Calendar (for school and home), the first thing I look at when I log onto iGoogle is Google Reader, and I entered the blogosphere using Blogger. (Wow, I hadn't realized how thoroughly entrenched I have become in using all things Google until just now!) So here's the thing; they're just tools. And there are other tools out there that do similar things. I don't know if I should be giving a presentation on tools. Especially since that's what it will be, a presentation. Not a hands on workshop. Just me and Jodie telling and showing. I have no doubt that people would come to a presentation on these particular tools, but how much of an impact will we make?

I'd still like to present at the VSS conference. And it is a Google tool that will be the inspiration (not quite the right term) for my presentation. What I'd like to present on is blogging. Not on how to get your students to blog--I haven't done that yet. No, on blogging as being central to an educator's professional development. I only really started blogging at the end of November, 2007. In the period of just over one month I've been exposed to so many fabulous ideas that have really impacted me as an educator. I'd like to expose the blogless to the thrills of conversing in the blogosphere.

What do you think; Blogging as a key part of an educator's pro-d, or should I just stick with the tool talk?