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Google-compiled listing of model Google Sites by educators. This is a great space to visit for inspiration and "new ways" of using the tool. Often times we use technology to replace a process or system without considering if that process or system is really the best way of doing things. Looking at models and searching for "out of the box" uses or hacks with tech tools can offer new insights into tech integration. I found the Reading Workshops to be an interesting use of Google Sites. Fifth grade students read a book and then created a Google Site to post their projects. Google Sites is collaborative and allows many teachers and students to contribute and edit the pages, much like a wiki.

This teacher shares her experience with using Google Apps to work on a collaborative writing project in schools that were two hours apart. She lists some of the benefits of using Google Apps, as well as a few downsides. This is a great site to look at if you are considering introducing Google Apps in your school.

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.

Great article with numerous ways Google can help you become a better educator. The really beneficial thing about this resource is that it is divided into numerous categories: General, Collaboration, News, Search, Communication, Organization, Maps, Books & Literature, and Images.

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 interesting discussion, albeit from 2010, about the pros and cons of Google Apps for Education. The author, Karl Fisch, is discussing the long-term effects of a Google Apps domain log-in (versus @gmail.com) and how it can prevent students from creating a sustainable digital footprint. Google Apps is a powerful tool in education and can open many doors for collaboration and content creation, but Fisch raises an important point about the apps and the very crucial email log-in that comes with installing them in your institution. Should we instead be asking students to create their own GMail log-ins and avoiding the Apps altogether?