Google

Google – Today in class the pace was pretty fast and let my head spinning a couple of times. I have jotted down some brief records of integration ideas, tricks, websites, etc. On day 1 we went through some of the advanced options in Google. I had seen Dr. Z overview Google Docs at iTech. Getting a chance to work with them in class has been great. It is such an easy tool for collaboration, I wish I would have had it when I was writing up tech standards and benchmarks. Besides working on documents there is also the opportunity to upload presentations which we would later use in class. I see this as a definite for introduction at next year’s inservices. Google Pages was another useful tool we covered. Talk about making websites easy. I wish I would have had this for technology class when I was looking at introductory web pages. I used Microsoft Word and iWeb, but I feel this is a far superior product for middle school students to be working on.

Some of the tricks today that were useful included the zoom option using Cntrl + Scroll. I will make sure this is enabled on all the teacher machines this year. Woot also had a USB missile launcher that would have been a nice piece of technology to have available in the classroom. Picnik.com is also a nice little site for editing images that I think students will enjoy.