Google Earth

I had not had any previous experience with Google Earth before now, though I had often heard others sing its praise.  Having now downloaded Google Earth and explored it myself, I agree that Google Earth is an amazing application of modern day technology that I could not have imagined existing when I was a kid.  I can easily understand how Google Earth can be employed as a powerful tool in the classroom.

A.  I learned about many interesting Google Earth features through the Atomic Learning tutorials.  For instance, I learned that users can measure distances in Google Earth by selecting the Ruler from the tool bar.  Many different measurements styles are available including miles, kilometers, and yards.  I measured the distance from Taiwan's northern tip to southern tip to be approximately 232 miles.  Another feature I learned about through an Atomic Learning tutorial is the History tool.  For instance,  I zoomed in on the Johnson University campus.  The most recent view of Johnson's campus is from April 23, 2012.  It was really surreal to see my van parked outside my townhouse (and my husband is right, I do park crooked!).  Using the History tool, I was able to view Johnson's campus all the way back to 1992.  It was very interesting to see the different phases of construction that the campus as undergone.  When I looked at the image of Johnson's campus from March 30, 2009, I was able to find my car parked outside of the trailer on campus that we lived in at that time.

B.  I love, love, love Google Lit Trips!  I discovered the Google Lit Trips website under the high school ideas section.  Google Lit Trips use Google Earth to map locations, journeys and events in novels.  For instance, I explored a Google Lit Trip for Night by Elie Wiesel that shows the various locations discussed in the book and has historical photos and descriptions from WWII embedded in the placemarks.   I also looked at a Google Lit Trip created by students that shows the place of birth of 15 famous poets and has placemarks that you can select to view a brief biography of the poet and listen to embedded podcasts of a selected poem being read aloud.  I have already saved several Google Lit Trip KMZ files, and I look forward to using some of these lit trips and creating my own.

C.  The Google Earth Education Community website is a very valuable web resource for teachers.  Some of the information on the website includes instructions for making Google Earth presentations, organizing locations into folders, and creating and personalizing placemarks.  The Google Earth Education Community website also has various lesson ideas and examples of Google Earth applications organized by academic discipline.  For instance, under the Literature category, there are seven different Google Earth related ideas and downloads.  I particularly like the William Shakespeare Locations in Plays that uses Google Earth to show 89 different locations found in Shakespeare's plays.

I am enamored with Google Earth right now and am already imagining using it in multiple ways in my classroom for both teacher and student generated presentations and projects.  I look forward to experimenting with Google Earth further in the future so that I am better prepared to utilize it in the classroom and teach my students to do the same.

Google Maps

Before exploring Google Maps further, I had only associated Google Maps with looking up directions. I did not know the extent of Google Maps' functions.  I really like how you can switch from map view to satellite view.  I also like the option to turn on photos and view photos taken from different parts of the selected map area.  For instance, I zoomed in on Qingdao, China, turned on the satellite view and photos, and was then able to view pictures from various areas of the city.  My husband and I hope to move overseas to teach, and I can imagine Google Maps being very helpful as we strive to familiarize ourselves with whatever city we move to, both before and after we arrive.

I really like the idea of using Google Maps in the classroom.  I reviewed the high school English Language Arts lesson plan titled "Historical Novel."  In this lesson plan, the teacher instructed the students to use Google Maps to create a map and plot the journey taken in the novel My Brother Sam is Dead by adding comments to the map describing the different steps in their journey and the major events at each location.  I like this idea of using Google Maps to help students better appreciate the topography and journey distances in novels as well as using it as a visual organizational tool for them to track the characters' progress through the novel.

Google Maps would also be very useful to help students create mental images for the settings described in novels.  For instance, a rural student may not appreciate a description of the city as a "concrete jungle," but Google Maps would help them to zoom in on New York City and see the seemingly chaotic, crowded maze of buildings and roads.  In the same way, if a class is reading a novel set in a foreign country, they could use Google Maps to gain a better understanding of the location.

I look forward to using Google Maps more in the future and implementing its use in literature portions of my curricular units.

Google Sites: My Very First Wiki!

I chose to create a website for a hypotehetical English Language Arts III Classroom.  I chose this topic because I imagine that I will be creating many such wikis in the future once I have my own English classrooms.  Please see URL below to link to my Google Site.

https://sites.google.com/site/mrsmiddletonela3/home

Google is a Verb: Optimizing Google Searches

Using Google to conduct searches has become so commonplace, modern English speakers now use Google as both a noun and a verb.  I often hear others or even myself say something like "I'll have to google that later" or "You should google such and such." Most people are fairly familiar with basic Google search procedures such as using specific keywords, but not everyone (including myself before tonight) knows how to use Advanced Searching, Image Searching, Google Custom Searching, and Google Alert.

Google users may use a number of operators to restrict or better define their search results.  For instance, one well known operator is the use of quotation marks around exact phrases or lyrics.  Operators that I had never heard of before include using a dash before words or websites you want excluded from your search results (e.g. memoir -samsung), using an asterisk in place of unknown words (e.g. "to be or not to be, that is the *"), and using two periods to indicate a number range (e.g. wikis in the classroom articles 2006..2012).  If you are unable to remember these search operators or are uncomfortable with their use, you can always select the Advanced Search option to the side of the standard Google search box, which will guide you through an advanced search checklist for narrowing or specifying your search query.

Advanced Search can also be used for image searches.  For instance, I performed an advanced image search for pandas with the following restrictions: colors in image-full color, type of image-photo, and region-china.  If using an iPad, users may also use Google Goggles to take a photo of an image and search for other related images based on that photo.  For instance, I used Goggles to take a photo of my keyboard and Google pulled up search results showing other Apple keyboard images and related websites.  This neat iPad feature only makes the little greedy voice in my head shout louder "I must have an iPad of my own ASAP!"

Google Custom Search is another tool that teachers may be interested in using if they wish to create a Google search specific to their website (if they have one) or a custom search that restricts students to specified web information sources. I am interested in this Google feature, but will need to explore it more in depth before I would be comfortable setting it up in my own classroom.

Google Alert was my most exciting discovery of the night.  I had never heard of this Google feature before; essentially, the Google Alert feature allows users to sign up to receive email notifications when new search results are found for a specified query.  For instance, I created two Google Alerts this evening; I should now receive email alerts when Google finds new news for the searches "dyslexia high school" and "common core state standards initiative," both of which are the general topics of research papers I am currently developing.  Google Alert has great potential for aiding teachers in continual professional development by assisting them in staying on the cutting edge of teaching strategitis, technology, and educational reforms.

As always, I am very pleased to have learned the above new tips and tricks that will help me to better use Google in the classroom and for professional development.

Google Drawing: A New Digital Canvas

Google Drawing is another tool within Google Drive that may be useful in the classroom.  The use of this drawing tool is very simple and should be intuitive for anyone who has used a similar software, such as the drawing toolbar in Microsoft Office.  Google Drawing enables students to insert lines, shapes, photos, clip art, text, and more; it could be used for simple charts or (for talented users) fairly intricate drawings.

In the elementary lesson plan I reviewed, "Book Buddies,"the teacher asks students to use a digital drawing tool to illustrate settings and characters for books they were creating.  In a high school English language arts classroom such as I intend to teach, I can imagine using Google Drawings to allow students to work in dyads or triads to complete storyboards, either for books they have read or stories they are writing.  I can also imagine asking students to use Google Drawings to design their own editorial/politcal cartoons in a lesson exploring inferences or graphic media.  Designing and filling in graphic organizers for pre-writing and analysis strategies is another activity students may collaboratively complete using Google Drawing.

Although I probably will not use Google Drawing very frequently in the classroom, I am glad to know  it is there for whenever I should wish to implement a lesson plan activity which requires students to work collaboratively to draw or design graphic organizers.

Google Forms: A Great Surveying & Quizzing Tool

Setting up a quiz or survey on Google Forms was surprisingly simple and straightforward.  I really like that many different question format options, the different themes to choose from for the form design, and that the forms were so easy to share via email.  When it came to using the self-scoring feature for the forms, I had a little trouble at first setting up the spreadsheet using formulas (formulas make me think of math, and math makes me want to hide under my bed curled up in the fetal position). However, with the help of my classmate, I persevered and figured out how to set up the formula to automatically calculate answers, and I understand how this would help teachers to save a great deal of time when grading assessments.  Although I will need to practice more with Google Forms before I will completely comfortable implementing it in my curriculum, I can envision using this program in my classroom for student surveys and quizzes.  For instance, I may use Google Forms to quickly survey students concerning their dominant intelligences and interests at the beginning of the school year.

In the high school language arts lesson plan I reviewed, titled "Writing for Context, Audience, and Purpose," students used Google Forms to design and execute polls asking their classmates to respond to questions regarding "shared readings, pop culture, news items, or events in the class or school or local community."  Student groups used the information garnered from the survey/polls combined with material learned in class to collaboratively create and share a class newsletter through Google Docs.  This lesson plan was very much student-centered and project-based, and I can imagine students enjoying using Google Forms and Google Docs to create an authentic, relevant product in the form of a class newsletter.  I really like this lesson plan idea, and may very well steal and modify it for use in my own English language arts classroom someday.

Using Google Spreadsheets in the Classroom

Most of my experience with spreadsheets is through Microsoft Excel, though I have used Apple Numbers on occasion for personal records.  I am very familiar with spreadsheet software due to my time working as a secretary in a university registrar's office.  Google Spreadsheets offers an alternative software that gives users more collaborative options such as sharing, editing, and commenting.  I was impressed with the many similarities between Google Spreadsheets and Excel, such as the ability to rearrange columns and rows, sort alphabetically, and format cells.  Entering and editing data in Google Spreadsheets is just as easy to master as in other similar software programs.  I was impressed with the many quality charts, maps, graphic organizers, and other gadgets that were available for insertion in Google Spreadsheets, as well as many templates to choose from in the template gallery.  Like Google Presentations, I would probably only elect to use Google Spreadsheets if I needed to work collaboratively on a spreadsheet with someone or a group of people. I still find Excel much easier to manipulate, and Excel and Keynote have more formating and design options.  Excel also makes using formulas easier, whereas the function option on Google Spreadsheets left me a bit confused.

I liked the lesson plans that demonstrated how to use Google Spreadsheets in the classroom to document experiment test results and lab work, and I can see Google Spreadsheets potential for collaborative projects in the classroom, particularly in math and science classrooms.  As an English language arts instructor, I can envision having students use Google Spreadsheets within Drive to create spreadsheets that record and reflect related data.  For instance, maybe at the beginning of a curricular unit studying various genres, I might have the students survey each other concerning their favorite genres, record the answers in a spreadsheet, and create a pie chart to reflect the data.  I could also have students work in pairs to create a new vocabulary log in which they would enter information into the spreadsheet according to the vocabulary word's definition, where they encountered the word, the part of speech, synonyms, antonyms, and etymology of the words. I look forward to using Google Spreadsheets in the classroom for collaborative projects.

Taking Google Presentations for a Test Drive (Pun Intended)

I was impressed by the collaborative features of the presentation program in Google Drive.  In many ways, Google Presentations is similar to PowerPoint and Keynote, so most students who are familiar with these programs should be able to adapt and use Google Presentations with little to no specific instruction.  Like PowerPoint and Keynote, Google Presentations allows the user to choose templates and layouts; create slides; arrange slides; insert text, images, and video; and select from various transition options.  However, I would only opt to use Google Presentations if I specifically wanted to use it for collaborative purposes due to its unique sharing, commenting and editing features. PowerPoint and Keynote have a great deal more design, format, and layout options, which are valuable for encouraging and facilitating creativity and effective visual communication skills.

I reviewed the middle school language arts lesson plan titled "Choose Your Own Adventure Story."  For this lesson, students were required to work in pairs to compose a Choose Your Own Adventure Story about leprechauns and to create a non-linear presentation in which the audience selected different hyperlinked options which determined which slide they would view next, and hence, how the story would progress.  I appreciated that the lesson plan included example presentations, specific instructions for linking to slides within a Google Drive presentation, video tutorials, an evaluation method, NCTE and ISTE NETS-S standards for students, and a detailed scoring rubric.  I especially liked the provided Flow Chart & Presentation Template, which gives the students clear guidance in how to format their story/presentation.  This is one lesson plan that I can see myself "stealing" and adapting for use in my own classroom.

Google Docs: A Whole New Playing Field for Collaborative Learning

Google Docs is a wonderful new digital media tool that teachers may use to facilitate collaborative learning in their classrooms.  When using traditional word processors such as Pages or Microsoft Word, students have to repeat an attach-email-download cycle in order to share and edit documents.  Google Docs takes out the email middle-man and allows users to share, view, and edit documents simultaneously from different locations.  

My classmate and I practiced using Google Documents in a test document.  I was very impressed with all of the different features, particularly the editing tracking, comments, and research features. We were able to quickly and effectively communicate and edit our document, and we had fun while doing it.  I can easily see the Google Docs great potential for collaborative projects in the classroom.

I really liked the middle school lesson plan that utilized Google Docs to create a collaborative new vocabulary project.  Each student/student pair contributed one slide dedicated to their assigned vocabulary word, and the teacher later shared the complete presentation with all the students slides to the whole class.  I can see myself using a similar activity in my language arts lesson plans.

Professional Blog Review

I chose to review Will Richardson's blog.  According to his "About" page, Richardson is a parent, a former educator with 22 years of experience, an award-winning author, and the co-founder of Powerful Learning Practice.  In his writing, Richardson focuses on "the intersection of social online learning networks and education."  For instance, in his July 3, 2012, blog post titled "Personalized Flipped Engagement," Richardson discusses the deeper meaning and practical application of three words often tossed around in educational circles --personalization, engagement, and flipped.  Richardson's blog is well-written and organized, and he just won over one more follower!