Wednesday, October 19, 2011

Google for Education (and other collaborative goodies!)

This week, our class is looking into how we, as future teacher librarians, can use content collaboration tools. After joining Google+ (another thing to join!? Another thing to check? Yes and yes!), I can see how it is changing the way social networking in the classroom. The use of circles makes the issue (and fear) of privacy a little less daunting, allowing users to share only certain information with certain groups, or circles, of people. The chat feature would be useful for conducting a virtual bookclub over the summer (or anytime of year!)

Other ideas:
• Set up a Google Doc for students to input their lab results on after a science experiment, allowing students to analyze the classroom data.
• Use Google Calendar to share your schedule with teachers - publicize the time you are free to collaborate with them!
• Create a classroom Wiki and collaborate with students from another part of the country or world
• Have high school students create a Mindmeister (http://www.mindmeister.com) when brainstorming an upcoming group research project
• Middle school students can create "Choose you own Adventure" type books with Storybird (http://storybird.com)

Possibilities = endless.

4 comments:

  1. Really like the idea of having students keep track of their own data using a google doc!

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  2. Mindmeister provides an excellent platform for brainstorming a research topic. I've used it for that and it works well.

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  3. Love the idea of having a virtual book club using Google+!!!

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  4. I really like the idea of a shared Google calendar. At the libraries I've been working at, there is a lot of schedule discussion and negotiation. Why not let the teachers work out scheduling issues themselves? Making this aspect transparent would allow them to do so.

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