Google Documents/ Presentations/ Spreadsheets would be very useful for my students, especially when I assign group work. My students could create a document that is shared by everyone in the group and then start working on the group project in Google Documents. Anyone can edit any time and it is saves almost immediately through Google. Students could all use a different typing color and by so doing you would know who edited what. If I were invited as a teacher I could check their progress and make sure they were staying on track with their assignment. I could even go in and edit their work. With more feedback, the students will be able to better prepare their assignments when they turn them in. You can share word documents, power points, and spread sheets all in Google. Basically any group project could be completed with out the group meeting. I could see that this would be extremely beneficial, especially for middle school students who don’t have the capabilities to really get together and meet.
Google Calendar is a great tool that could be used in a variety of ways in my classroom. First of all, I could sync my calendar with my class website and it would provide students with information about what is due when and what things are coming up in the class. I could also put school and community events on there. This would be a great tool for a student to use if they are absent and want to know what they missed or what they need to catch up on. I could color code different things on the calendar so students would know what the event was just by looking at the color. For example, all my class assignments could be red, community events involving history could be blue and general school events could be green. It would help me, as well as my students, to stay organized.
I think out of all the applications we have looked at, IGoogle was by far my favorite. There were so many things you could do to customize it and make it your own. I did so many cool things to my IGoogle page and then discovered that my students couldn’t see it! I know you can do similar things to blogger that I did on IGoogle, but still, I was so thrilled with it. I loved all of the gadgets you could add. I loved this day in history gadgets and famous artwork gadgets. I also had a President quotes gadget that has a new presidential quote on their everyday. I guess the main use for me, as a teacher, would be to fill up my IGoogle with gadgets and customizations that would give me little facts or some material that I could possible use in my lessons. For example, if there was a really good quote I liked by Abraham Lincoln one day, I could save it and then add that quote into my Civil War Unit. I also loved the web portal to Washington so you could get updates about what is happening in the government. Students could create their own IGoogle and then add their own customized gadgets. I just wish students could see my IGoogle.
I don’t think that Forms is a part of Google tools any more. I looked for it on the list of tools but was unable to locate it. I don’t know if other students have had a similar problem. If they haven’t I am probably just looking in the wrong place and will readjust this reflection upon finding the Google Forms app.
Blogger is a really cool way to get creative in the classroom. There are all different kinds of layouts that you can use or different backgrounds to personalize it. It is really easy to add new posts. There are lots of things you can add to it through different gadgets. You can add countdowns, calendars, this day in history, all kinds of stuff to really make your site more applicable to your class. One way I thought I could use this in my classroom is to post something on my blogger and then have the students comment on it. For example I could say, go to such and such website and tell me what you think and then they could leave a comment for their assignment. This does get into fairness issues but if not all students were able to answer their homework in this way, then we would work something out. You can also add video and pictures to the class website. I thought if there were interesting video clips I would want my students to watch, they could just go to my website and find the movie rather than searching the web or typing in the URL. It is pretty practical to use blogger for things like this because blogger really makes it easy to upload things onto the blog. Blogger is also generally easy to use and I feel that if I were to have my students use blogger they would respond well to that.
Reader is really great! I never knew it existed! I subscribed to a website that is for history teachers in secondary education. It’s a website to share ideas, lesson plans, and questions other teachers have. I can see all the updates on the little window to the right. It also shows how many updates I have in parentheses next to the site name. The site name also turns bold when the site has been updated. Instead of visiting all of your favorite sites by opening all these different windows and such, you can add them to your profile and view them with one click on the side bar. I also subscribed to some personal sites that I like. I subscribed to Martha Stewart crafts, which have really cute ideas not only for home but for school too! I think this website is beneficial for me as the teacher because I can subscribe to all these websites that will help with preparing lesson plans and teaching my students. I am going to subscribe to every reliable history site there is. Reader will save you time as a teacher because you won’t have to visit each site individually. As for the student, the only benefit they will get from this is the awesome material that I will be able to find. It doesn’t really change the ways in which I communicate with them.
Google Maps is also a really neat application. It will bring up a map of anywhere in the world and then you have the option in a drop down box to choose what the map shows. You can choose to have the map show terrain, pictures, architecture, the way the geography looks during different seasons, videos, articles about the area, ect. There are a wide number of things that you can look at through Google Maps. One way I would use Google Maps is to have the students look at different terrain in different seasons. For example, if we are studying a battle in the civil war that was fought in December in Virginia. I would have the students click on Virginia and snow to see what it might have looked like for those soldiers fighting in that battle. It would also be a useful tool to look at areas of the world that we can’t go to or see without the help of pictures or the Internet. For example, say we are studying WWII. I can have my students go to Google Maps and then look up cities in which major battles were fought and pictures that are associated with that city. I think as a teacher, this provides a great opportunity to give students the chance to discover on their own. It will also save me a lot of time. Instead of searching the Internet to find appropriate pictures, I can just go here, narrow down my search, and will find the pictures I need.
Google Earth is amazing. I liked the feature for 3D images. The moving water was really cool. I also liked how you could search by country, region, state, city, or geographical landmark. That would make it possible for my students to search for just about anything that we cover in class. I also love the virtual tour maker application. You can choose any place or number of places you want to have in your tour. Once you have a sequence of places marked you can create your own tour and then Google earth will fly you to all the places within your tour. You also have access to other tours that were created by Google Earth users and take their tour if you prefer. As a History Educator, this is like, well, I can’t even describe all the cools things you could do with this! You could do a virtual tour of WWII or the Nazi blitzkrieg in the USSR. You could basically create a custom tour of places you want your students to see without going there. The students can get online and take the tour of whatever subject it is on. I love it and can’t wait to use it in my classroom. I also liked the option to email it to your students. My only concern was how I was going to make it easily accessible for my students and the best way would probably to email them the link and have them download the free software.
I would probably use Google Groups to have class discussions or to update the students on happenings in the class. I could create a group, then invite all my students and then I could post things on that page and they would get the message. They would also be allowed to post back any questions, concerns, or comments about my post. We could even get online and chat. My one question is that could you ever have a private conversation with someone so that their statement is not shared with the class. I am concerned about this for two reasons. If a student has a question and needs to ask but doesn’t want everyone to see, do they have that option through Google groups? If so, can the students have private conversations with each other? It would make me nervous if they could because of cyber bullying issues. But I think I could use it for class discussions or for students who have been absent and need to make up work. They could get online and participate in a discussion and this class without attending. I could also use Google Group to collaborate with other teachers and use a forum for educators to get ideas as well as advice.
The Google customized search engine is also a great tool to use in my classroom. There is always so much to sift through when you try to search something on the Internet, but with this I can create my own search engine so it only searches the sites I want. This is helpful for my students because I know if they search through my search engine then I know their sources are reliable because I only allow reliable websites in my search engine. It also helps the reliability of my work if I ever need to use the search engine. I think it would take time to compile a good search engine, but you can always add to it and make it better.
Google Scholar is great in that it sifts out everything that is not an academic source. This would be a good source for my students because every source that is available to them through this search engine is a reliable and academic source. It also helps me as a teacher because I know the information that I get off of Google Scholar will be high quality. Google Scholar also saves time for both students and teachers because novice work is not even in the search and therefore you don’t have to spend time hunting through different websites trying to find reliable information.
I chose to look at the news application on Google. I thought this would be a beneficial application for my students to look at to keep up on current events. Google news updates you on local news as well as top stories. You can also choose to edit the news that you do see. For example, if you are really interested in financial news, you can choose to have more financial news on your page. I could have the students choose to have more history on their page or more government news. I could have them use this site to write about current events. There are many ways Google News could help me. You can subscribe to different news feed. I would subscribe to education, technology, and history news feeds so that I could keep up to date and educate myself about what is going on in the world of those three areas. Hopefully, I will be able to gain new tips and learn about new things by reading the news articles in this subject.
Overall, I feel this reflection has opened my eyes to the wide variety of technological tools that are available to teachers. All of these tools in one way or another would be helpful to both teachers and students. I think it would be a lot to work in if you tried to use every technology we have discussed in this reflection but it could be done. I see value in all of them and can’t wait to actually use them in my classroom.
