Group items tagged

The Langwitches blog is a great resource for language arts and technology. In this post, the author discusses how to use Google Maps as a digital storytelling tool. Students can use Google Maps to tell personal stories, create scavenger hunts, map the settings of stories being read in class, and more. 

Tons of information about a lot of different Web 2.0 resources. There are many resources that we have learned in class, including building a PLN, blogs, etc. In addition, there are numerous blogs and posts about adding Google Apps into the classroom that we might find useful!

This is a more research-heavy link about integrating web 2.0 tools, like Google Apps, into a project-based learning environment. It's a heavy read, but offers a lot of deeper thinking around the concept of PBL and some great bibliographic resources. One of the most intriguing parts of the paper for me was the distinction made between what constitutes a web 2.0 tool versus a web 2.0 activity, which should guide us in the way we implement Google Apps. Should these just be replacements for traditional, 20th century activities (ie: a Google Site becoming a digital poster-board project), or should our decision to implement these tools be something more? This is the quote making said distinction: "From this definition web 2.0 is understood as a set of technologies, but also as a range of activities with certain characteristics. In this way we can distinguish between web 2.0 technologies or resources as e.g. blogs, microblogs and podcasts and then web 2.0 activities or practices such as blogging, podcasting, and micro-blogging. This distinction has been further explored by Dohn (2009) who has defined web 2.0 as a range of activities or practices, rather than technologies, which she characterises in the following way [10]: 1) collaboration and/or distributed authorship, 2) active, open-access, "bottom-up" participation and interactive multi-way communication, 3) continuous production, reproduction, and transformation of material in use and reuse across contexts, 4) openness of content, renunciation of copyright, distributed ownership, 5) lack of finality, "awareness in practice" of the "open-endedness" of the activity, 6) taking place on WWW, or to a large extent utilizing web -mediated resources and activities."

This is an example of an ambitious geography project carried out by a team of 7th grade teachers. Students created a class globe/atlas with Google Maps and kept an explorer's blog about their "Amazing Race" circumnavigating the globe. This project integrates a lot of content while also being student-directed and offering some choices. 

This post from the Google for Students blog is a great introduction to how to manage group communication and deadlines as a member of the group using Gmail and Calendar labs and tricks, but these tips can also be used for teachers looking to manage and assign groups for projects. The author recommends creating a contact group for each member of the group and creating a shared calendar with those addresses. Teachers can use these same grouping features in Gmail to easily communicate with whole classes. For example, I might want to send an email to my first block English students but not any of the other blocks - I can easily do this by grouping those students in a "Contact Group." I can then share the class calendar with them and filter their emails using Gmail filters. And the organizations and taxonomies can go deeper from there.

This is a blog dedicated to the use of Google Apps. The group is comprised of people who want to share their experiences with Google Apps in education.

This is a really informative resource page with numerous video testimonials and webinars from administrators and schools that have incorporated Google Apps. There are also videos discussing how Google Apps work.

Education blogger Tom Barrett has compiled some great ideas for using Google Maps in the math classroom. Based on the crowd-sourced map, teachers can view activities for students between grades one and 5 (elementary). While this is an elementary map of math activities, the idea could easily be scaled to higher level math classes.