Screencast+Examples

Here is my screencast on Fast Flip and Googlepedia. Both are easy to use.

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Google Spreadsheets is part of Google Docs and that offers many of the standard capabilities of spreadsheets.

I felt Google Spreadsheets was a great tool for students’ collaboration because students can use it to work on files with their partners. Students can share a spreadsheet with a classroom and everyone can input data, or view and edit it across more than one computer. In addition, it is also useful for teacher to have students work on a collaborative assignment, such as co-editing essays, collaborative research papers, group discussions, and so forth. It is easy to see which student contributed what because there is a revisions history and teacher can see who contributed. It offers that students have the opportunity to easily read the writing of their classmates. Also, it can encourage students to improve their own ideas and development.

Google Picasa is a free application that helps you instantly organize, edit, and share all the pictures on your PC. Picasa may be sort of similar with Flickr, however, these two have different function. Flickr is a more socially based form of picture sharing, and it does not have a good program for organizing the pictures like Picasa does. Picasa's program is able to be used offline without hassle, and it keeps the photos already on the computer organized into neat albums. Flickr simply limits the amount of options available to free users, however, Picasa is free and anyone can download from www.picasa.google.com.

Therefore, this software will be great for students because it is free and very easy to organize and manage their photos. Also, teachers can use Picasa to create an album for each student and share the classroom photos online for parents. In addition, Picasa has the movie maker feature, which could be used by both teachers and students to make a slideshow of photos that can be played throughout a lecture or presentation.

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Google Squared is an interesting search engine. I actually really enjoyed searching for information! It was easy to find the information as well as compare the information with other results. It is basically set up in a grid format that has columns and rows. It is easy to follow. I didn't come across any negatives other then sometimes when when I had added a column it wouldn't find the information about the column topic. So that was frustrating at times.

I think that this would allow students to research in the classroom on many different topics. It is easy for them to use, but provides a different aspect then just always using the traditional google.com.

[] I was very impressed with KidRex. It is a "kid-friendly" (and free) web search sponsored by Google that filters or blocks (most) innappropriate or sexual content. This allows for teachers and parents to breathe easier as their student/child is cruising through the Internet for information.

The second one, CommonCraft, is a resource that offers easy to follow and very simple videos on a variety of topics. The topics are not vast (at least not yet), but the ones that are there would be excellent for PD or for introductory lessons in the middle to high school setting on a variety of lesson plans.

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