Thursday, February 19, 2009

Google for Educators

In exploring the Google for Educators Website, as a future Elementary Education teacher, I believe I would be most likely to use the following resources for these reasons:

  • Picasa would be a fun Google product for Kindergarten students to use, as this is one of my first preferences in grade levels to teach. This site would encourage excitement and companionship among students as well as allowing them to come up with their own collages/stories/presentations about particular pictures. These would be great to use after a field trip to help install what the students learned. Students could also showcase their own photographs using this Doc which could aid in organization skills, File management, and other useful computer use skills.

  • Google Earth as part of the GeoEducation would be an amazing resource for making Elementary school history a lot more viable and significant. Students can search for pictures from a particular event and connect them to the places they took place in. Google Earth, or maps for that matter could also be used to assist in math lessons, with showing the different properties of tsunamis, aid in making Literature more exciting with Google Lit trips, etcetera. The GeoEducation product from google would be a great interactive resource.

  • Another product I would use from Google is iGoogle. I think this would be a great way to help kids stay on top of their class work and activities that were going on. Not only that, but this would be a great asset for parents who want to stay up-to-date about what's going on in the classroom. In addition, for the younger kids, having one site for them to visit instead of causing them to search multiple different sites for information may cut down the risks of unsafe Internet practices. It would also be a lot handier for parents than having to try and get a hold of the school or trying to remember information last minute. With iGoogle parents and students can access classroom information wherever there Internet is available.
Google Docs are a new discovery to me, but I am finding that they could be used as a great learning resource in the classroom. Our world is growing more technology based and so if students get early exposure, I believe they are probably going to be more prepared for the world they are going into. Also, I believe Google Docs is just one more way they can express their knowledge. Each and every student will learn in a different way, and Google Docs creates multiple means of representation and allows students to communicate in multiple different ways with multiple different people. Most of the Google products I looked at seemed to provide a more 'hands on' approach to learning and definitely provides fast ways of distributing and organizing information. I hope to be able to learn more about these Docs and ways to implement them into my classroom instruction.

No comments:

Post a Comment