Colette Cassinelli’s edtech VISION

Thanks to Jeff Utecht who Ustreamed my Google Apps vs. Google Tools presentation at NCCE.  I’m kicking myself for not saving the chat but appreciate all who attended and participated online.

NCCE twitter group http://twittgroups.com/group/ncce

Webcam chat at Ustream

Stop spending hours looking for information online – have the information come to you. How can make this happen?   By using Google Reader and RSS

What is RSS?  RSS (real simple syndication) is the ability to “subscribe” to changes made on a website or blog. (Click here to view a video: RSS in Plain English)

First, you need to access your Google Reader.  Go to http://www.google.com/reader and sign in with your Google Account. This is where all of your subscriptions will be stored.

If you are not aware of which websites have RSS feeds, you can search for them by clicking on Add Subscriptions” button and search for feeds.  The search results will list websites that have RSS feeds for your topic.  Choose the one that interests you by clicking on the “Subscribe” button to add this information to your reader.  Now whenever that website has an update, you will be notified in your reader.  Unread messages are saved in “bold” until you read them.

If the RSS feed in incorrect or no longer useful, you can unsubscribe and you will no longer receive updates in your Google Reader.

There is another way to add feeds to your Google Reader. When browsing on a website, look for the standard RSS icon for subscription options. Click on the standard RSS icon. Most blogs have feed autodiscovery enabled, meaning the site will automatically tell Reader where to find a blog’s feed. If this doesn’t work, you’ll have to add the URL of a site’s feed directly. Find the RSS logo on the site in question, click it, and copy and paste the link into the ‘add subscription’ box.

If you can’t find an RSS logo on the site, the site may not offer RSS feeds.

Once you get into the habit of subscribing for news or information, you will find that you search less.  Stay up to date with breaking news, School updates, latest blog posts or news from your favorite website with RSS and Google Reader.

Once you become familiar with Google Reader, make sure you check out these cool features:

• Organizing your RSS feeds with folders and tabs
• Sharing interesting items with Friends or by email
• Adding Notesto your articles
• Accessing your RSS feeds on your mobile phone

An archive of Tech Tip Tuesday is located at http://sites.google.com/site/techtipstuesday/

By MaryFran Lynch

Do you have a special interest that you would like to follow but just can’t always find the time to search for the latest information? Google Alerts can help. Google Alerts are e-mails that are automatically sent to your inbox whenever new information becomes available on your search terms. Depending on your search preferences, Google will monitor News, Web, Blogs, Video and Groups (or all of them) for new information, and send it to you on the schedule you’ve set up.

For example, suppose you are interested in following a news story, advances for a specific medical condition, or have a particular professional interest, set up a Google Alert. When new information is available, an e-mail and snippet will be sent to your inbox.

Or, if you prefer, you can arrange to have your Alerts send to Google Reader. This alert was delivered to my Google Reader only 9 minutes ago, keeping me on top of breaking news.

Is your New Year’s Resolution to get organized?  Yes – then you need to give Google Calendar a try.  If you have a Google or Gmail account – then you have access to a powerful Calendar system.  Just go to  http://calendar.google.com.

With Google Calendar you can keep track of everything in your life – birthdays, events, school activities, appointments — whatever you need.  The beauty of the calendar system is that you can combine all events onto one master calendar but also separate them into individual color-coded ones.

One of my ALL-TIME favorite features of Google Calendar is the email integration.  You can automatically add events to a calendar when Gmail recognizes a message that contains a date – all you have to do is click on the link in the sidebar of your Gmail and voila – it’s added to your calendar.

I use several color coded calendars for different categories – family calendar, birthdays, school events, and professional development events.  I can easily view or hide one category at a time – or see everything together.

When adding an event to the calendar, I can choose to set a reminder, or invite specific people to events.  If they accept the invitation - the event will now show up on their Google calendar.  Now my husband can’t tell me I “forgot” to tell him something — all he needs to do is check his calendar.

You can view the calendar by day, 4-day, week, month or as an agenda.  You can even print out a paper calendar each week/month.

Other users can see your calendar if you choose to publish your calendar and make it public.  We do this for the athletic schedules and school events for our school.  See how they are used at http://www.valleycatholic.org/about/calendar.php

Some other great features are:

• Calendar sharing
• Mobile Integration
• Quick Add
• Search
• Import from Outlook Calendar
  

Learn more at Google Calendar Overview http://www.google.com/googlecalendar/overview.html

Tech Tip Tuesday is written and published weekly by MaryFran Lynch and Colette Cassinelli.  The archive of all tips are located at:  http://sites.google.com/site/techtipstuesday/

Can’t get enough news? Want a (nearly) up-to-the-minute update on what’s going on in the world? Then Google News is for you.  Google browses over 4500 news sources to update news on a continual basis. News items are refreshed every 15 minutes, automatically arranged by relevance and popularity. This provides the freshest information available, all without human intervention.

Google News provides stories in many categories: Top Stories, US, World, Sci/Tech, Business, Sports, Entertainment, and Health. As with many Google tools, if you have a Google account, you have the opportunity to personalize the page. Don’t care about the latest breaking Sports story? Just click on the box, and it disappears! Want more Sports but less Health news? You have the opportunity to edit the the section, get as few as 1 or as many as 9 of the top stories for that group. And, you can drag and drop News Sections to rearrange/customize the page.

You can keep track of the news breaking in your backyard.  Add your Zip Code and keep apprised of what is happening in your locality. Prefer to monitor world news? You can change the country (and in some cases, the region of the country) you get your news from by changing the country in the pull down Top Stories menu.

You can search past news by using the News archive search, or have news delivered to your e-mail account “as-it-happens” by setting up a Google Alert. Want to make sure you can take the news with you? The news is never farther away than your mobile phone. By entering your phone number in Google Mobile, you can get the latest headlines and search for news wherever you are. RSS and Atom feeds are also available for any Google News section. This gives you the opportunity to add the news section(s) you are most interested in to your iGoogle page or Google Reader.

And when you find an article you want to read more of, just click on the headline, and you are taken to the news source’s full article on the story.

Even More:

Image Version

For those who prefer to browse the news through images, rather than text, Google News has an Image Version. These images are also updated frequently by a computer program. Pictures are arranged on the left, while the corresponding news headlines are listed on the right. As you scroll over a picture, the lead-in to the story is displayed. Click on the headline, and you are taken to the news source’s article. However, you might prefer to see more pictures, the “+n” in the lower right hand corner of a picture, takes you to more photos of the story.

News Archive Search

Google continues to help organize all the world’s information and make it accessible. They have partnered with newspapers, publishers, libraries, and repositories to make historical newspaper archives available online. When an archive search for people and events is done, the results allow you to view results by date. At the top of the page, you can choose an  automatically generated timeline (much like the one in Google Advanced Search). As with Google Advanced Search, you also have the option to restrict the results by date or source. Note: some articles may require a fee from the provider for access to the full article.

Google News in Your Classroom

Now that you know about Google News, think of how you can integrate it into foreign language, science, social studies, language arts, or even physical education classes. Students have another opportunity to view primary-source information, helping them understand the people and events that have and continue to shape our world.

We’d love to know how you use Google News in your class. Let us know by e-mailing us at: maryfranlynch@gmail.com or colette.cassinelli@gmail.com

Advanced Search – Part 4

Sometimes finding the information you need on the Internet is challenging.  You are not alone.  According to the World Internet stats, there are 1.4 billion Internet users and there are over 200,000 websites registered EACH day.  Heck -there are 14,672,685 individual pages on Wikipedia alone!It can overwhelming when you discover there are almost 60 million search results for “John McCain” and 82 million results for “Barack Obama”.  Most of us are confident when we search Google that the information we need will be located in the first ten results – but that is not always the case. This past month you have been shown different ways to search on Google – like choosing descriptive, specific words, or adding “quotes” around multiple terms, or many of the unique Google search terms such as:  weather, define or local search. If you haven’t used the Advanced Search page on Google – you should consider using it and teach your students to use it too.   You don’t need to remember to use “quote “ or + signs when using advanced search.  The key to effective searching on the Internet is to know which search terms to use to narrow or broaden the results you receive.  Just type in your search in the section for: all of the words the exact wording or phrase one or more of these words I especially like to choose to have more than 10 results displayed.  Want that to happen EVERY TIME you search?  You need to go into your Global Preferences (http://www.google.com/preferences) and change the number of search results you always want displayed. Don’ want to see results in other languages – you can change the language settings to English only. Searching by file types is really helpful if you are looking, for example, a PowerPoint presentation you saw at a conference.  I heard about a PowerPoint template to make Jeopardy games and easily found it by searching for “Jeopardy” and choosing the “PowerPoint” file type. Selecting a specific date will prevent you from receiving old and out-of-date information in your results Another must is to turn ON the SafeSearch filter. A few hints about using the Image Search in Google. When your students are searching for an image using Google image search, the image results come from ANY web page that has been indexed by Google.  Right below the image search bar is an option to choose image size.  This is very helpful to find large enough images so you don’t end up with a pixelated image by trying to enlarge a small photo. In the Advanced Image Search, you can customize your search by image file type, color, size and turn on the SafeSearch filter. Many images found in Google Image Search are copyright-protected images so please consider requiring your students to include citations for their images as well as content information.  Sample: http://temple3.files.wordpress.com/2008/06/barack-obama-official-small.jpg and do not accept “Google Image Search” as a citation. Some other sources to find copyright-free or creative commons licensing images are:   Wikimedia Commons – http://commons.wikimedia.org  morgueFile – http://www.morguefile.com/  Pics 4 Learning – http://www.pics4learning.com/  Stock.XCHNG – http://www.sxc.hu/  Flickr/Creative Commons – http://www.flickr.com/creativecommons/ (NOTE:  Many Flickr users have chosen to offer their work under a Creative Commons license, and you can browse or search through content under each type of license – but remember – these are personal photos that people have taken – search safely!) This comic explains Creative Commons licensing:  http://mirrors.creativecommons.org/comics/sharingcreativeworks/sharingcreativeworks.pdf

~ MaryFran and Colette

http://sites.google.com/site/techtipstuesday/search-tips/advanced-search—part-4

Jonathan Rosenberg, Senior VP, Product Management writes on the Official Google Blog that future-thinking businesses are looking for “non-routine problem-solving skills”.  These knowledge workers solve problems with creative thought and tenacity.

Google is looking for ..

… analytical reasoning. Google is a data-driven, analytic company. When an issue arises or a decision needs to be made, we start with data. That means we can talk about what we know, instead of what we think we know.

… communication skills. Marshalling and understanding the available evidence isn’t useful unless you can effectively communicate your conclusions.

… a willingness to experiment. Non-routine problems call for non-routine solutions and there is no formula for success.

… team players. People need to work well together and perform up to the team’s expectations.

… passion and leadership. Be motivated by a sense of importance about what you do.

He goes on to say, “keep on challenging yourself, because learning doesn’t end with graduation.”

As educators we must ask ourselves  ….

…. are we preparing our students to work in this type of environment???

I’ve been so busy hosting family this past weekend that I haven’t had a chance to finish my blog post about Google Teacher Academy.

First of all, I must thank Cristin Frodella from Google and the folks from Cue (Mark Wagner and Mike Lawrence), WestEd and all the returning GCTs for hosting this year’s Google Teacher Academy. It was truly a honor to be selected to represent Oregon and private school teachers everywhere at the academy.

I will blog about the new features of the Google tools that were shared …but for now I am just processing the experience.

Another huge thank you goes out to Sallie Hill and Brian Mull for starting the wikis that allowed us “out-of-towners” to virtually meet and make plans to get together. Meeting these fabulous teachers face-to-face made all the difference in my Google Teacher Academy experience. Our local tour guide, the PodPirate himself, organized get togethers the night before the academy (see photo above), that evening and a tour to Monterey Bay Aquarium the next day for those still in town (photos). Having the social time to meet and share ideas with the other GCTs was SO valuable that I recommended that next year’s Academy should encourage it!!!

I was already pretty familiar with many of the Google tools but the critical piece that I was missing was how easy it was to SHARE with others what you make with the tools. Cheryl Davis and Kathleen Ferenz are working on a cool project for the upcoming elections. Did you know that you can take an ENTIRE TAB from you iGoogle home page that you designed with widgets and RSS feeds and SHARE IT with your friends and colleagues???

I had seen Jerome Burg’s Google Lit Trips before and wanted to dive deeper into how he organizes these projects in the classroom but there was just too much to learn so I will explore more on my own.

Try Google 411 by calling 1-800-GOOG-411 (1-800-466-4411). Its’ Google new service that allows you to call from your cell phone and ask questions and look for businesses based on zipcode and if your cell phone has Internet, it will also provide maps. http://www.google.com/goog411/index.html#utm_source=us-et-more&utm_medium=et&utm_campaign=GOOG-411

Oh, there is so much more … EVEN MORE!

So, for now I am energize to plan how I will use all these great tools of Google in my classroom and begin working on some professional development for teachers at our school and in my area.

Meanwhile, check out the Google Almanac – created by Google Certified Teachers.

I am thrilled that my application to Google Teacher Academy was accepted and I just found out that Martha Thornburgh @roswellsgirl will also be there.

After I attend the academy and participate in the ongoing professional development I will be a certified Google teacher!! Stay posted.

Here is the one minute video I made for my application to the Google Academy.

Motivation is the key to learning