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Google Launches Redesigned Education Site

January 30, 2012 | 1:00 PM | By

Google

Google has revamped its site for educators, creating a redesigned repository for all its educational tools and resources for teachers, schools, and students.

The newest feature is News and Calendar, a listing of all events and deadlines for Google’s education endeavors.

Google also created an online booklet called Google in Education: A New and Open World for Learning, which lists the company’s initiatives and programs within the education realm, such as the Computer Science for High School program — university-created workshops for local high school and middle school computer science teachers teachers.

“We’re hoping educators will use this year-round for ideas on how to enhance teaching and learning,” said Google spokesperson Rachel Durfee.

And for those who jumped on the Google+ bandwagon, a specific Google+ page for educators.

The main Google in Education link offers much of the same content as before, but it’s better organized and redesigned. The Teachers site leads to Google’s many apps that can be used for teaching specific subjects, as well as design and collaboration tools. It’s divided by K-12, higher education, and examples of how education systems across the country are using the tools. The site also offers a list of professional development links, including webinars, online workshops, and tutorials, which are primarily centered around Google products and services. The Student Showcases link lists student-created material, such as worldwide panoramas using Google Earth and Sketchup models of homes, towns, and robots.

Schools and districts can find links to YouTube for Schools, which allows students to access YouTube EDU while blocking non-educational videos; App Engine, which hosts school web apps on Google’s system; and Google Apps for Higher Education, a free suite of hosted email and collaboration application.

For students, the site offers a list of awards and competitions — think YouTube Space Lab and Google Science Fair; programs like Summer of Code, which offer stipends for student code Continue reading →

FILED UNDER: Digital Tools, Google, google apps for education

12 Ways to Be More Search Savvy

December 27, 2011 | 8:00 AM | By
This week feature the most popular posts on MindShift over the past year.

Flickr:YouDon

Google has made it possible for us to have instant information gratification. Just start typing the first letters of your search word and the site intuits your question and offers you the smartest choice of answers.

Seems simple enough. But as quick and facile as the process is, there are ways to be even more efficient, more search-savvy. And it’s our responsibility to teach kids how to find and research information, how to judge its veracity, and when it’s time to ask for a grownup’s help. I spoke to Daniel Russell, Google’s “search anthropologist” in charge of Search Quality and User Happiness (yes, really), who brought to light some important tips you may not have known.

  1. CONTROL F. A deceptively simple tool, the Control F function (or Command F on Macs) allows you to immediately find the word you’re looking for on a page. After you’ve typed in your search, you can jump directly to the word or phrase in the search list. According to Russell, 90 percent of Internet users don’t know this, and spend valuable time scrolling through pages of information trying to find their key word. “They’re being terribly inefficient,” Russell says.
  2. KEEP IT SIMPLE. Use search terms the way you’d like to see them on a Web site. But think of how the author would phrase it. “It’s not about you, it’s about the author,” Russell says. “What would they say and how would they say it? What are some common terms and phrases they’d write? It’s the kind of thing that people over-think and are hyper-analytical about.” Stay on topic and keep it simple.
  3. DEFINE OPERATOR. This has to be one of the best items of Google’s offerings. To learn the definition of a word, just type “Define,” then the word.
  4. ONE MORE SEARCH. It’s one thing to do a quick search for Lady Gaga’s birthday. But for more important questions that have a direct implication on your life, do one more search. Go deeper and find a second corroborating source, just like a journalist would. “We are a credulous society,” Russell says. “When you have something you care about, something you’re going to spend a lot of money on, or an issue with your help, do one extra search. Never single-source anything.”
    Continue reading →
FILED UNDER: Big Ideas, Digital Tools, Teaching Strategies, Google, search

12 Ways To Be More Search Savvy

September 2, 2011 | 12:42 PM | By

Getty

You don

Google has made it possible for us to have instant information gratification. Just start typing the first letters of your search word and the site intuits your question and offers you the smartest choice of answers.

Seems simple enough. But as quick and facile as the process is, there are ways to be even more efficient, more search-savvy. And it’s our responsibility to teach kids how to find and research information, how to judge its veracity, and when it’s time to ask for a grownup’s help. I spoke to Daniel Russell, Google’s “search anthropologist” in charge of Search Quality and User Happiness (yes, really), who brought to light some important tips you may not have known.

  1. CONTROL F. A deceptively simple tool, the Control F function (or Command F on Macs) allows you to immediately find the word you’re looking for on a page. After you’ve typed in your search, you can jump directly to the word or phrase in the search list. According to Russell, 90 percent of Internet users don’t know this, and spend valuable time scrolling through pages of information trying to find their key word. “They’re being terribly inefficient,” Russell says.
  2. KEEP IT SIMPLE. Use search terms the way you’d like to see them on a Web site. But think of how the author would phrase it. “It’s not about you, it’s about the author,” Russell says. “What would they say and how would they say it? What are some common terms and phrases they’d write? It’s the kind of thing that people over-think and are hyper-analytical about.” Stay on topic and keep it simple.
  3. DEFINE OPERATOR. This has to be one of the best items of Google’s offerings. To learn the definition of a word, just type “Define,” then the word.
  4. ONE MORE SEARCH. It’s one thing to do a quick search for Lady Gaga’s birthday. But for more important questions that have a direct implication on your life, do one more search. Go deeper and find a second corroborating source, just like a journalist would. “We are a credulous society,” Russell says. “When you have something you care about, something you’re going to spend a lot of money on, or an issue with your help, do one extra search. Never single-source anything.”
    Continue reading →
FILED UNDER: Digital Tools, Teaching Strategies, Google, search

Back to School with Google Chromebooks

August 25, 2011 | 2:00 PM | By

Yesterday was the first day of school for Grace Lutheran School in Oshkosh, Wisconsin. Among the various tasks that the students had to accomplish today were establishing their Google accounts and setting up their new Chromebooks. There’s already a certain excitement that comes with a new school year, but according to principal Peter Iles, the students’ reaction to the Chromebooks was “pretty magical.” Several told him it was their favorite part of the day and the thing they were most looking forward to using for the rest of the academic year. That’s a ringing endorsement for Google’s new venture into hardware, sure, but it’s also a great attitude to start the school year.

Grace Lutheran is one of many schools that is taking advantage of the new Chromebooks for Education program, announced earlier this summer at Google I/O. For $20 per month per device, schools can rent the netbook-like, Web-only devices. There have been lots of criticisms of the Chromebooks from tech bloggers — they are underpowered computers for the price. But according to Iles, Chromebooks were the logical choice for his school.

Critics of Chromebooks have claimed that the Web just isn’t ready for people to rely solely on cloud-based apps, but some schools are proving otherwise.

The Grace Lutheran computer lab was woefully out-of-date. The machines were six or seven years old. To refresh the lab with new desktop computers would have cost around $35,000, not including all the software and licensing. To replace the old desktops with laptops would have cost about $15,000, again plus software costs, according to Iles. Instead, he opted to go with the Chromebooks — 20 of them will run his school about $14,000. But as the Chromebooks are rented, not purchased, that’s a monthly bill, and Iles said that it was far easier for the school to handle a small monthly payment than come up with a big chunk of money at once. Continue reading →

FILED UNDER: Digital Tools, Chromebooks for education, Google

Where Does Disruption Begin? With Teachers Who Teach Teachers

August 16, 2011 | 12:05 PM | By

Getty

Disrupting the entrenched education system is daunting. There are 7.2 million teachers in the U.S., 76 million students, and more than 98,000 public schools, according to a government census (as of 2008).

So what’s the most effective way to unshackle the current archaic system from ineffective tactics that no longer work in the digital age?

Google, the world’s go-to for answers, has an idea for the most impactful place to start. Last week, the company’s educational overseers organized the Google Faculty Institute, to which they invited the faculty from California State University (CSU) schools of education. The mission: to show those who teach teachers the most effective, useful, and helpful digital tools.

Why the focus on CSU teachers? Simple math — 60% of teachers in California and 10% of teachers in the U.S. — are trained through the CSU system.

“You get the attention of hundreds of these faculty members, then you make a real change in California.”

“We want to make California a model for the rest of the country,” said Maggie Johnson, director of education and university relations for Google. “We wanted to find a mechanism for talking about education technology and all the ways of using it in transformational ways — not just ways to support teaching as it’s always been done.”

Over the course of three days, the 39 attendees — mostly faculty who teach at the CSU schools of education — were tasked with coming up with proposals that would demonstrate the use of technology in new and inventive ways. They had to show how the proposal could be scaled and how it could go viral. For its part, in addition to hosting the event and providing experts and resources at the workshop, Google will donate $20,000 to each group, which has six to nine months to implement their ideas.

Here’s what they came up with:

  • The Math of Khan: Documenting, testing and disseminating the process by which a teacher can flip their classroom using Khan Academy videos.
  • Making Teachers ‘Appy’: Encouraging a “maker” philosophy with pre-service educators (teachers-in-training) by teaching introduction to programming in an educational technology course. Continue reading →
FILED UNDER: Digital Tools, Teaching Strategies, California State University, Google, google apps for education, Khan Academy, schools of education

Can Learning How to Blog Change Makeal’s Life?

July 28, 2011 | 8:00 AM | By

How can learning to blog make a lasting impact on a 12-year-old boy living in a rough, East Oakland neighborhood?

In the second installment of MindShift’s My Education series, which examines whether technology in learning can have a lasting impact on low-income kids through the perspective of one child, the question focuses on Makeal Surrell, a sweet-natured kid who lives with his two sisters and his aunt/guardian a few blocks from Elmhurst Community Prep (ECP) middle school.

Last year, Makeal missed more than 20 days of school, partly due to being sick from asthma. But since he started an after-school blogging apprenticeship with Google, through the Citizen Schools enrichment program, his absences have declined. During the spring semester, Makeal and his classmates were bussed once a week to the Google offices in San Francisco, where they were taught by Google employees all about blogging. By the end of the semester, Makeal had published his own blog about his favorite subject: skateboarding.

Or at least a little about skateboarding. During the spring semester, Makeal published eight posts consisting of mostly videos, photos, and a couple of short written entries. And though he started with three skateboarding-related posts, he moved onto other subjects that interested him: movie reviews and rap videos.

And that was the point — to get Makeal and his classmates a medium for their self-expression, as they learn technical skills like how to create a blog and upload content.

“The idea is to give them confidence as they move through school and potentially enter the workplace.”

“The educational environments … that have most impact will be the ones that create opportunities for kids to create digital media literacies that we all recognize as important and that have social implications, educational implications and civic implications, as well,” said S. Craig Watkins, author of The Young and the Digital in a recent interview. “So we have to equip kids with skills that help them not just to consume, but to become architects of their information environment.” Continue reading →

FILED UNDER: Culture, Teaching Strategies, Citizen Schools, digital-divide, Elmhurst Community Prep, extended learning day, Google, project-based-learning