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!!

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. 🙂 

Second Life on mobile device’s?

Last year when Google announced their Android platform they demo’d a device with a virtual environment.  This morning I read an article about a hack that allowed someone to access Second Life on an iPhone, and a new company that is going to make Second Life accessible on 3G Handsets… Sweet!

Now your second life can become a bigger part of your first life. 🙂

Translate Text from WebPage Inline

I have been very impressed with Google Translate for a while.  The ability to translate chat’s, and pretty much anything is changing the way we do research.  Well, here is another little tool to help in the process.  

I read about a new Firefox extension today called gTranslate.  It allows you to select text on any page and translate it to any of the languages that GoogleTranslate supports.  Awesome!  

Real Time Collaboration

GoogleTutor posted a nice reminder tutorial online today about the power of real-time collaboration with Google Docs and Spreadsheets.  This past semester a class I was taking wrote a nice paper as a whole class and used Google Docs for gathering everything together between us all.  Nice. 

Google’s New iPhone interface – pushing the limits of mobile browsing

I have obviously always been a fan of Google, but the work they are doing in the mobile device arena is just awesome, particularly with the iPhone.  This morning they announced a new interface that includes interfaces for the calendar, gmail, reader, docs, photo’s, news, and notebook. 

I also have all of these features on my blackberry and love them.  Most of them are just links to online sources, but they are still awesome. 

As this becomes more prevalent, students are going to be using these tools and maybe we can move beyond the simple text messaging population to a population that actually harnesses the power of the mobile web. 

What do you think?  Will this type of technology ever become part of education, if so, how long?