OneNote and Education : Get connected and collaborate in your Classroom with OneNote

I have been publishing too many shared items and not enough individual posts… so in an efforts to lighten things up, I am going to try posting some short posts so y’all don’t get too bored!

I have long been a HUGE fan of OneNote.  It may be one of the most under utilized tools for educators and students!  Take the chance to see what it is all about with this free webinar next Tuesday 1/20 from 4-5:30pm Eastern Time.

OneNote and Education : Get a Free Copy of OneNote 2007 – Tuesday, 1/20/09 Webinar – “Get connected and collaborate in your Classroom with OneNote”.

If you are an educator and attend the live session you will get a FREE copy of One Note!  That is awesome!  Here is the schedule of what they will be covering!

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Get tips on how OneNote can help you organize class materials and class work, create collaborative work environments, and share workspaces. In this webinar we will cover:

– Getting Started with OneNote

– How to get organized with OneNote

– Organizing class materials & class work

– Creating collaborative work environments

iPod Touch: Better (and more colorful) Than a TI-83?

TI calculators are so last year. Especially with the popular (and free) Graphing Calculator application being distributed in the App Store by Gabor Nagy. This app is, basically, a colorful TI calculator right on the iPod. Although it may not offer every functionality of a TI, the Graphic Calculator app allows for the most popular tasks, such as graphing up to five functions (all viewable on the same graph), tracing and plotting points, and a root finder. And to top it off, the graphs are colorful, and you can use the pinch-gesture to zoom and scroll the graph, much like when browsing the internet in Safari. You can even take a screenshot of the graph and email it to yourself. As of the most recent update, the following mathematical expressions are supported by Graphing Calculator:

Supported Expressions: log, log10, ln, exp, sin, cos, tan, asin, acos, atan, sinh, cosh, tanh, degrees to radians, radians to degrees, absolute value, square root.

There is no doubt that with innovative apps such as the Graphing Calculator being released, it won’t be long before not-so-new devices such as the TI calculators become outdated. As far as I know, we need more apps like this to give us an excuse to play with our iPods in class.

Google Teacher Academy: Chicago

I just wish they would do one near me… maybe some day… 🙂 Perhaps I can create my own curriculum…

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Google Teacher Academy – Chicago

Chicago, IL

September 24, 2008

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Applications Due: August 24, 2008
http://www.google.com/educators/gta.html
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We are pleased to announce that another round of Google’s FREE training program for K-12 educators is coming to the windy city! Outstanding educators from around the world are encouraged to apply for the Google Teacher Academy taking place on Wednesday, September 24, 2008.

The GTA is an intensive, one-day event (8:30am-7:30pm) where participants get hands-on experience with Google’s free products and other technologies, learn about innovative instructional strategies, collaborate with exceptional educators, and immerse themselves in an innovative corporate environment. Upon completion, GTA participants become Google Certified Teachers who share what they learn with other K-12 educators in their local region.

50 outstanding educators from around the world will be selected to attend the GTA based on their passion for teaching, their experience as leaders, and their use of technology in K-12 settings. Each applicant is REQUIRED to produce and submit an original one-minute video on either of the following topics: “Motivation and Learning” or “Classroom Innovation.” Applications for the event in Chicago are due on August 24, 2008. If possible, please use Google Video or YouTube to post these original videos. Participants must provide their own travel, and if necessary, their own lodging. Though we will give preference to K-12 educators within a 90-minute local commute of an Academy event, anyone may apply.

Learn more about the program and the application at http://www.google.com/educators/gta.html

The GTAs have been a wonderful experience for everyone involved, with 97% of all attendees rating the GTA as “outstanding.”

Here are a few quotes from GTA participants:

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“The academy was everything I hoped for and more! I can’t wait to plan out ways to use the tools we learned about, to share my experiences with my colleagues and to re-connect with the other academy participants!”

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“The focus on innovation in education, and not just about the tools, was right on target.”

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“I appreciate the opportunity to be connected to a group of educators that are passionate about preparing students for the 21st century. I feel inspired and able to meet the challenges that lie ahead!”

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“Until now, I had never attended a conference where I was so engaged and loving every minute of it.”

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“This was easily the most important professional development experience I have ever had as an educator. World-class tools demonstrated by world-class people at a world-class facility. THANK YOU!”

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“I love [the Google Certified Teacher community] for the ideas and inspiration that comes flowing to and from it…folks share professional development strategies (technology or otherwise) that have worked. It’s nice to have a variety of ways to assist others and having that variety also provides spice for those of us responsible for doing the providing.”

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Feel free to send any questions to “gteachers@gmail.com”, and please spread the word to anyone who may be interested in joining us.

We’re looking forward to another great event!

– The GTA Team

Google Translate for the iPhone/iTouch

Google has been great at coming out with new applications for the iPhone/iTouch. Last night they announced a new service that I think is really useful: a specialized interface for the iPhone/iTouch for Google Translate.

With the ubiquitous ability of the iPhone, and high speed 3G connection, this is a great find for any student traveling abroad, or anyone for that matter.

Google translate has really come a long way. I highly recommend it!!

Back at it with Conference Proposals

Okay… It has been a couple of months, and it is just killing me. Almost every day I see something that I want to pass along, so I am going to end m Hiatus and write a couple of blog posts now and again.

I have been working on two conference proposals, so hopefully I can write some of what I am proposing here as a sounding board… because, really, what is a blog anyway… 🙂

Here are my two topics I am thinking of proposing:

• “iPhone/iTouch in Education – How Location Aware, Ubiquitous Computing, Multi-Touch and Accelerometer will impact computing and Education.” – This proposal will focus on first on the capabilities of iPhones/iTouch’s and then on some of the applications that are available.
• “Using Web 2.0 to Help Those with Learning Disabilities.” – This proposal is growing out of some workshops I have been doing for our learning disabilities group here on campus. I realized that this is a place where technology can really help students, but not much has been written about it.

What do you think?

Free iTouch for Students that buy Mac’s

Apple just released their 2008 promo… any students that buy a Mac will get a free iTouch… how awesome is that! 🙂

I got an iTouch a while ago and I have to say… THEY ARE AWESOME. As close to small computers as I have ever seen! I can see these becoming a LOT more prevalent… especially on campus’ with WiFi everywhere (like UNC)! Awesome!

Google Translate Becomes the Best Free Online Translator

Shared by Jeff VanDrimmelen

This really is a big find for educators. When you come across a page in some language, just put it in here, and you can translate it… and with support for so many languages… it just doesn’t get much better! 🙂

Google Translate‘s coverage has been expanded dramatically. It now supports the translation between any of the following languages: English, Arabic, Bulgarian, Chinese, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hindi, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Spanish, Swedish (the new languages are shown in bold). From 26 language pairs, Google Translate now supports 506 language pairs and becomes the most comprehensive online translation tool available for free.

Obviously, the translation is far from being perfect or even coherent, but it’s a great way to understand the central ideas from a text. Now that Google Translate supports so many languages, it’s not hard to imagine that you’ll be able to read almost any web page in your language and maybe any application will be able to use Google Translate’s APIs to speak your language.

“Most state-of-the-art, commercial machine-translation systems in use today have been developed using a rule-based approach, and require a lot of work to define vocabularies and grammars. Our system takes a different approach: we feed the computer billions of words of text, both monolingual text in the target language, and aligned text consisting of examples of human translations between the languages. We then apply statistical learning techniques to build a translation model. (…) Automatic translation is very difficult, as the meaning of words depends on the context in which they’re used. While we are working on the problem, it may be some time before anyone can offer a quick and seamless translation experience,” explains Google Translate’s FAQ.

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Google Teacher Academy – Happy National Teacher Day

I received this e-mail today on a listserv I am part of. Google is accepting applications for their next Google Teacher Academy that starts June 25th of this year in Mountain View California… talk about awesome professional development! You should apply!

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Hello and Happy National Teacher Day,

In 1953, Eleanor Roosevelt persuaded the 81st Congress to recognize teachers with a celebratory day all their own. Since then, the date of National Teacher Day has bounced around a bit until 1985, when the National Education Association declared the first week of May National Teacher Appreciation Week and the first Tuesday of that month National Teacher Day. If you’d like to know the whole story, check it out here: http://www.nea.org/teacherday/index.html

On that note, we’d like to invite you to come celebrate and learn with us at the next Google Teacher Academy, scheduled to take place at the Googleplex in Mountain View on June 25th, 2008. The Google Teacher Academy is a FREE professional development experience designed to help K-12 educators get the most from innovative technologies. Each GTA is an intensive, one-day event where participants get hands-on experience with Google’s free products and other technologies, learn about interesting and new instructional strategies, receive resources to share with colleagues, and immerse themselves in an innovative corporate environment. Upon completion, GTA participants become Google Certified Teachers, who share what they learn with other K-12 educators in their local region. This time around, we’ve listened to your feedback and opened up the application to all teachers everywhere. As long as you are willing and able to get yourself to the Googleplex, we’d love to have you. For more information about the GTA, please check out our full information and requirements page: http://www.google.com/educators/gta.html

The team of people thinking more about teachers everyday is growing here at Google. As such, we’re introducing a new section of the Google for Educators site – dedicated to using our popular Geo Products. Here you will find information about using Google Earth, Maps, Sky, and SketchUp in your K-12 classroom. Along with some of the great classroom activities we’ve collected over the years, we’ve also included starter kits which feature “cool and easy things you can do” with each product in your classroom. Check it out here: http://www.google.com/educators/geo.html

Lastly, but never leastly, a few months back, we asked you to share stories about using Google Docs with your students. You told us about the power of introducing collaborative writing to your kids, you mentioned using our presentation software in class, keeping students engaged with the “chat” feature, and you told us how much you like to be able to drive success throughout the writing process, instead of just grading the final product. http://www.google.com/educators/p_docs.html
While we were reviewing your stories, we realized that Docs may be a bit intimidating to the uninitiated so we developed a “getting started” guide – with step-by-step instructions for creating accounts, sharing and collaborating, editing and organizing your work. Now there’s no reason to be scared, so give Google Docs a try: http://docs.google.com/View?docid=dcdn7mjg_72nh25vq

We hope today is a true celebration of your vocation – and we’re wishing that all of those who are thankful for your hard work take this time to express it. I know I speak for everyone at Google when I say that none of us would be where we are without the amazing men and women who dedicated their lives to teaching us much of what we know today. On behalf of Google, I’d like to say thank you – to each and every teacher – for all that you do every day.

Cheers,
Cristin Frodella
Google K-12 Education Outreach

Google for Educators
http://www.google.com/educators

YouTube LIVE! Educational Use…

So there have been live online streaming services for a while now, but none of them have seemed to take off.
Today TechCrunch linked to a video that said YouTube was going to have offer live video streaming services sometime later this year.

Aside from being a huge Google fan, this could potentially be important in Education for one reason… users. YouTube has a HUGE user base.

A lot of teachers are already familiar with YouTube and will be more likely to start using a feature in a program they already use. I need not repeat the value of live streaming for a classroom. Teachers can teach for distance education, not to mention a global audience! With real time feedback tools like chat and twitter, teachers can also get real time feedback from around the world! 🙂

Students will also find a much larger user base to present to.

Those are just some ideas off the top of my head. What about you? What other things can you think of?

Google Chat Badge

Just read about a new Google Chat option that I think is pretty sweet.  You can now embed a widget on a blog that will allow ANYONE, even those without Google accounts to chat with you.  I have embedded one on my blog, so feel free to chat with me. 🙂

Uses in education?  Could be used by teacher’s as another way to get students to talk to them… then again… maybe we don’t want that. 🙂