Google Teacher Academy….the next few hours

Now that you’ve had some time to digest my experience of the first couple of hours of the Google Teacher Academy in London, here are some of my favorite takeaways from the subsequent (but still not all of the remaining) hours.

• Use “street view” in Google maps to give context to literature and historical events and to facilitate students’ pre-thinking before doing written tasks. Want to go even further? Turn your students’ annotated Google maps into videos (including their own narration) using a tool such as http://animaps.com. I hope to use this as one of the main tools students use to complete the “Through their eyes” project referenced in the last post. I hoped to embed a sample, but it didn’t work so here’s a link to a quick example I did using Jing to narrate and record the street-view of my high school. This is just a sample; I don’t have anything special to say. But your students might! Just imagine going on street view to “tour” the sites where history and literature took place!

• Video creation tools students and teachers can use are already compiled in a list provided by YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/create. With carefully crafted goals, objectives, directions, and rubrics, you may find your students demonstrating their knowledge in ways you had never dreamed. Or you could present your own material in new ways. I would encourage you to play with the tools first, however, if they are new to you. It will help immensely in your planning for the first day the students use the tools. On a related note, I almost always plan “play time” first with a new tool before assigning a “high stakes” project to be completed using the tool. This way the students are given the time and support they need to understand the tool before also trying to demonstrate content knowledge using that tool. This is especially true of online animation tools. The students are still speaking French when they “play”; they simply aren’t also worrying about the “project.”
• I’m starting to teach myself some basic Java scripting in order to maximize the potential of certain Google tools, including Google Forms and Google Sites. One of the most useful scripts allows students to click a button on your Google Web Site to submit their assignments (created in Google Docs) directly into a collection in your own Google Docs folder.
• One online tool with great potential–especially for collecting data on how well students are understanding and applying concepts, you can use Flubaroo (which includes the scripts you need) to create self-grading quizzes you can insert into a Google spreadsheet
• The Chrome store could be its own source of great tools for teachers. It is a lot like the iTunes store, but for the Chrome Web browser–the link I provided to the Chrome store will probably only open if you’re in Chrome. Since I haven’t brought this up yet, it’s worth saying here: in case you didn’t already know, Gmail and Google Docs (and probably other Google tools) don’t play nicely with Internet Explorer. Those of you who are experienced Chrome users can skip to the next section, but for the rest of you who are new to Chrome, read on: A few months ago I caved and downloaded Chrome browser in order to increase the functionality of both Gmail and Google Docs. I was very pleased with how well both tools worked once I wasn’t using Internet Explorer. But it wasn’t until Google Teacher Academy that I realized how much more one can do with Chrome browser compared to traditional Web browsers. Imagine you’re on Chrome on your home computer and you find an application or extension  you like. Extensions are buttons you ask Chrome to install that appear to the right of the address bar allowing you to access certain tools or carry out certain activities with just one click no matter what Web page you currently happen to be looking at.
  The red arrow in the picture below is pointing to two extensions that are installed on my Chrome Browser. The first one (the “plus” sign in the orange background allows to easily share and bookmark. I didn’t have to look for that extension because it is part of Chrome when you install Chrome. But the red box with the “@” symbol I installed. It is discussed below.
• Anyway, you find an extension you like, and you install it in Chrome on your home computer. Then you get to work and open up Chrome on a different computer. Once you sign in (with the same account information you have for Gmail or Google Docs),  everything you installed at home is also installed on the work (or other) computer. For example, I added the red “@” extension above that allows me to send any Web page I’m viewing to Evernote just by clicking on it. For fun, I also downloaded apps from the Chrome store just so I could see how this worked. I tried an online typing test from the Chrome store and I also put my WordPress account on my Chrome home page. When I logged into to my computer at work, everything was there for me–the apps, the bookmarks, and the extensions!
• Gmail has “translation bots”.  First, find the email address of the language(s) you want. For example, for a translation bot to go from English to French, the address is en2fr@bot.talk.google.com. Add that address to your Gmail contacts.  Start a “chat” and invite the bot for the language you want as a participant. Then students can then type in English, and it will do a passable translation into French. As a language teacher, I won’t be using this, but I could see other classes using this if they have collaborative projects going on with classes in other parts of the world. In playing with the French-to-English translation bot, I did find that spelling matters. Some language teachers might find this useful because the students would in theory know what they were trying to say when they typed the sentence in French, but if the English result comes back garbled, there is clearly an error somewhere in the sentence, and the students would have to find out where that error is. But this only has limited application and usefulness in the modern, proficiency-oriented language classroom, the same way students can test their pronunciation by trying to get the French Siri on the iPhone 4S to understand their questions.
• Ngram viewer: this tool is part of the Google books suite. It does a comparative analysis of search terms and works in English, Chinese, French, German, Russian, Hebrew and Spanish. I ran a sample search in French, comparing the terms “holocauste” and “Shoah” from 1920 to 2000. While most English speakers refer to the deportation, imprisonment, torture, and killing of Jews (and other populations) as the “Holocaust,” the term has been replaced with Shoah in French (and I actually heard on NPR recently that the term Shoah is starting to come into usage in English as well). Holocaust technically refers to any destruction or slaughter on a mass scale and originally was a religious term coming from ancient Greece, meaning “whole offering” or “burnt sacrifice”. The Hebrew word Shoahmeans “calamity” or “destruction” and some feel it is more appropriate when applied to the campaign of genocide that occured in WWII. When you look at the results of the Ngram viewer, you can see the change in language usage occur in French literature over time.

If you click on one of the dates in the table displayed below the image, it will bring to you search results in Google for books using those terms.

For example, I clicked on the box on the top left (1920-1989). Here was the result:

I’m still sorting out my own thoughts on the conversations we could have in class regarding the results of carefully selected search terms. I can only imagine the implications in literature and social science courses!

More Google Teacher Academy reflections coming soon…..

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