Google Apps Store and the Classroom

Always the innovator, Google is working to change how we interact with the internet. Earlier this week, Google unveiled their Chrome Web Apps Store. Like what iPhone and iPad apps have done for mobile devices, Google is hoping to do for the internet. If you aren’t already running Google’s browser, Chrome, you’re missing out on what 120 million other people have fallen in love with, myself included. Chrome is, in a word, fast. Combine that with the instant search capabilities that Google recently unveiled and we’re off to the races. One convenient feature is that the address bar duals as Google search, yet again saving you precious milliseconds of browsing time. Pair these tools with Gmail’s new priority inbox and, voila! you’ve freed up approximately 3.6 minutes of your day!

Chrome is King!

But back to the Apps Store…Apps run in Chrome browser and in the future will function as applications on Google’s Chrome OS, which they also previewed recently and have a handful of netbooks from Samsung and Acer slated for debut in early 2011.

While Google is certainly changing the face of the internet, with so many schools going 1-to-1 (mine included), the face of education is changing too. (See here and here for previous posts on how Google Docs can be used in the classroom)

The Apps store is just getting started, so it only has a few hundred apps, but I wanted to preview a few of the early winners for classroom use. [update: in the day or so since I started writing this post, the education apps has gone from around 60 to 111!]

Google Books: Create your own library of ebooks that resides in the cloud. Synchs with all of your web-enabled devices. See a short video touting its benefits here. Google’s new ebookstore just might give internet giant Amazon a run for its money

Aviary: Web-based image editing tool. Feature-rich and easy to use, this is a powerful image editing tool that is impressive for the cost – free!

Wikihood: Calling itself a “world browser” it is basically what you would get if you genetically engineered Google Maps by inserting the gene for Wikipedia. An interactive world map allows you to click anywhere in the world and bring up relevant cultural, historical, and other kinds of info. It goes right down to street level, and would make a killer app for traveling to a new city.

Sliderocket: This is like Google Presentation, on steroids! Too bad you have to pay for an account over 15MB and for synching with Google Apps. Boo!

Planetarium: Another google maps like experience but for the night sky. Tell it your location and you can look up at a virtual sky. This could be great if you teach in a city with lots of pollution like I do, and want your students to see what the sky could look like if only they’d quit turning on so many lights!

Graph.tk: A free graphing utility that looks pretty cool on the surface. Didn’t dive much into it but I’ll leave that up to the math and physics crowd. Seems like it could be pretty student friendly way to quickly visualize graphs though…

Evernote: This is basically just a link to the online Evernote at this point, but maybe in the future it will be a more feature-rich application. Not so much for your classroom instruction, but will help keep you sane. Love Evernote for just keeping track of odds and ends, and in fact just recently bought the full version and dig it.

Get your news fix with apps from NYTimes, NPR, or if you’re feeling less serious, the Onion

Not exactly school, but…

Tweetdeck: The ever popular program for keeping track of facebook, twitter, and everything else social, is now available in your browser as a Google App. Haven’t noticed much difference in the functionality yet…

Others I didn’t get around to trying but look like they could be cool:

Creately: The popular mind-mapping tools comes to Google Apps. Downside: not free 😦
Aerotimer: Basically an egg timer for you browser. I typically use online-stopwatch.com in the classroom and project it up on the overhead, but maybe I can use this to set time limits on the amount of time I spend in Google Reader….
Quicknote: An extension from Diigo, for taking quick notes. I’m pretty fond of Stickies in OS X but maybe worth a shot

The exciting part is that the store is just getting started, and for the moment a lot of the apps are glorified bookmarks. But it’s definitely a start, and the possibilities are exciting…

Differentiation 2.0

[here’s one that’s been on the back burner for a few weeks…]

Recently, coworker Cory Willey and I presented a workshop at Seoul International School on using technology and differentiation titled “Differentiation 2.0” Our goal was to highlight some current web 2.0 tools that work well with various strategies for differentiation. We organized the session around some of Carolyn Coil’s ideas on differentiation. Carolyn Coil recently came to our school for a weekend workshop and shared some great ideas and strategies (See here for a previous post live from the workshop…).

(You can check out the website here)

We organized it around the four areas of differentiation and featured a tool well suited for each area:

• Content – Delicious and Social Bookmarking in the classroom
• Process – Webspiration
• Product – Prezi
• Environment – Google Apps

Some reflection on the session:

• 50 minutes was too short! We just scratched the surface and it would have been great to have more work time and more discussion
• The website was great. Weebly once again has demonstrated its ease as a web design tool.
• The MS/HS combo of presenters seemed to work well, being able to offer something different for different teachers (yay differentiation!)
• Prezi and webspiration were enthusiastically received and teachers seemed to pick them both up quickly
• Differentiating for teachers may be even harder than with students…Admin, librarians, ES, MS, HS, tech staff, what a diverse group!
• No one seems to have utilized our idea for the sharing space on the website. Wonder how many times the site has been visited after the session? Wonder how to bring people back…

Get a grip on Google

Last week I led a series of PD sessions on ways to use Google Education Apps to make life easier in the classroom. Jumping on the Google Apps bandwagon can feel chaotic at first. Last month I posted a few Google Apps tips on this blog, but I wanted to play around with Google sites so I went ahead and created a site. It features some suggestions and walk throughs on some basic strategies for managing 100+ students, and hopefully minimizing the somewhat inevitable chaos that will ensue when they first start creating and sharing assignments with you.

Check out the site here.