Thing 45 ~ Cloud Computing

I'm a huge fan of Google Docs! We use it daily in our school library media center to schedule classroom spaces and computer labs. In the beginning, there were definitely some problems setting up all of the accounts for the teachers, but once we figured out the bugs it's been great. I've had really great feedback from teachers and plan on using it again next year! To those interested in using it, be aware that there is a difference between an individual account and a team edition account. This is what gave us problems when setting things up. If you're aware of this before you begin, it should make things much easier.

Some of the advantages of using Google Docs for our scheduling:

• multiple people can view and edit at the same time
• revision history makes correcting mistakes a piece of cake
• people can edit any time or place
• you can upload documents
• automatically saves
• it's free

Some of the disadvantages:

• team edition can be confusing if the user already has a google docs account
• the email list feature didn't work properly so we had to copy and paste all the addresses

I also like all of the photography sites that keep a backup of all of your pics. I'd be devastated if I lost all of them and it's great to know they're backed up in several spots!

Google Maps--Thing 32

I had so much fun playing around with Google Maps. I made a map of things to do around Elk River with children.


View Fun Places for Toddlers & Preschoolers in a larger map

As a high school media specialist, I'm thinking this could really be fun for some teachers to incorporate in their classes. For geography, students could make maps of the countries they are studying. They could make a virtual field trip of the country or city. World language students could do the same. It would also be fun to plot different events from history or literature. I know Google Lit Trips has a wonderful Grapes of Wrath site. Students could make their own. Student travel groups could map their trips and add pictures, videos & other info. With all of the different sites from 100+ there are a ton of possibilities for a wide variety of classes.

Thing 29 Google Tools

Overall, I really like Google tools; they've made many things in our media center easier this year. We use Google docs everyday at our school to sign up for space in the media center and computer labs. I've gotten some great feedback from staff. However, we definitely have had some bumps in the road. When I first set up the account, I didn't realize there were two ways of accessing the accounts. There is an account set up for our school , a team edition, and there could be accounts set up through Google. At first, it was really frustrating trying to figure out which account had been used. Luckily, there is a way to move your documents from one account to another. Also, sometimes staff never clicked on the invitation link and so they weren't granted permission to edit the site. Fortunately, this occurred with a small minority of the staff. Different people access it differently, but it is working for everyone now. I think I'll stick with it for next year simply because people really like it--when it works correctly! Our office conference rooms were recently added too. It's so much better than binders even if there were some kinks! I really like that multiple people can edit the document at one time; users can see who is editing at the same time as well. It's one of the reasons I picked Google Docs over a wiki.

Also, our special ed. department uses Google calendar to book IEP meetings; it has helped with booking too many IEPs in one day. Emails can be sent as reminders too.

I've just started using Google alerts, and I think students might really like setting them up as they do research projects. Our 9th graders do a current issues unit and this might really work well for them in addition to Google News. I like how Google News has a most popular tab as well as top news stories in other countries. I will still show students ProQuest and other databases, but I think it's a great tool to show them as well.

Thing 28

I've used iGoogle for sometime, and I will stick with that one. I think the others are great, but I really like all of the applications that come with Google. I do think sometimes it can take a while for my homepage to load, but often I don't spend tons of time there. Between RSS feeds, emails, blogs, and now Twitter, I feel like I have plenty of information. One gadget I really like is the To Do list. It keeps everything in one place. The only downside--it is a never ending list. I'm the type who will add things I've done to my list, just to be able to cross them off and feel as if I've accomplished a ton as I toss it. Not quite the same online!

With all of the options available, there truly is something for everyone! It's interesting to evaluate why people prefer what they do.

I think iGoogle is extremely easy to use and I love many of the tools, but I'll talk about those in the next blog!