Google tools for teachers

Speakers online conference Education on Air showed how to create comics, posters, individual schedule, and other useful things.

The Education on Air conference was held by Google may 8 and 9 and joined thousands of students around the world. Of course, many speakers shared with the audience their experience with the tools of the company-organizer. Matt Miller, a lecturer and author of books for teachers “Throw the book”, published in his blog a compilation of tips use Google technologies presented at the conference. I must say, Matt Miller has extensive experience in the implementation of technology in the learning process, as I am convinced that paper books do not satisfy all the needs of modern education.

So, here are some selected Matt Miller’s recipes, use Google in the classroom, flavored with our own observations.

Using Google Drawing, Google Slides, you can create comics from photos. He and the other tool allows you to work on a comic the whole team. You can arrange a team competition at the wit and knowledge of the subject.

All the same Google Drawing allows you to create posters in addition to traditional paper posters of images and text can contain still active links.

Google Forms helps you to create surveys (for making lists, quizzes and much more). If you want to schedule a consultation so that should be enough time to work with each student, but the rest did not have long to wait, use Google Forms together with a service Form Limiter. It allows you to set limits on the number of responses for certain items. For example, do you do newsletters with a question about how much students are willing to come to the meeting with you, offering several options time. When one is overloaded and others are forced to choose another time.

YouTube is not just a huge video chronicles, it is also a tool for collaboration. To use it for educational purposes, you can create a separate channel, where the students uploaded their video answers to your questions and completed. Using the YouTube Video Editor tool you and your students can mount uploaded to the channel rollers new works.

What if to make a lesson exciting in the same ways that are used in films and television shows — to add a little intrigue and adventure? This will make Google tools that you’ve long use for other purposes. For example, Google Maps to create routes for quests, virtual or real. Google Drawing — for an interesting quest tasks feed and Google spreadsheets — in order to make the game results and findings of the teams. So offers to do James Sanders, one of the speakers at the conference, in his lecture “How to survive the zombie Apocalypse with tools Google apps for education”.

Google Street View can be used for example online game GeoGuessr, developed by Swedish programmer Anton Mallenom. The essence of game consists that you to virtually “throw” in a strange corner of the planet, and you by types Google Street View have to guess where you are. You can arrange for their students a virtual tour – “guessing game” not only on city streets, but also to museums that are in Google scholar.