WVSKPhillips Domain

It seems that every time I turn around Google has added yet another tool to help educators. Ok – I know they aren’t JUST for educators, but dang! They sure are useful!

I have been taking an e-class through my education department and have learned about Google sites. Now – I’ve had a wiki for a few years that I’ve used with my classes and homebound students. I think the Google sites are much easier and more intuitive to use for beginners; but they also have enough ‘bling’ for a more advanced user’s wants.

Several uses that have been listed on my class’s discussion board for Google sites outside of student use with projects included professional collaboration. Administrative schedules could be posted. Announcements could quickly be uploaded and updated. Documents via google docs could be updated in real time thus saving multiple versions of a document floating around in email-world.

On-line, real-time collaboration between rooms, schools, and countries just keeps getting easier and easier. What are you waiting for?

Wow – here I was – taking a quick break from writing lesson plans for the week – just foolin’ and toolin’ around and look at what I stumbled across….Newtools!

Click on the “click here” button to see new possibilities. My thoughts for this in my classroom would be to use this when kids need a break from the usual routine, when things are getting stale, on early out days and class periods are short, and so on. Once you see how it works, you could also make your own options with your own curriculum and choices for how/what type activities and let kids draw from a hat. Then give them 20 or so minutes to get set, do whatever researching they need to do, practice, and then have them hit the stage! This would be lots of fun and the kids may not even realize they are learning as well as doing a little teaching.

Oh my heck! Sharing websites and links with each other just got soooo much easier! Check out Sharetabs. It’s a very simple, straight-forward, no-frills site where all you do is enter the links to the sites you want to share. Once you have those entered, click on “tabify ‘em”. You will be given a link of www.sharetabs.com/___ with those dashes filled in with a three-digit code. You send that full link to your friend and once they click on it, they will be taken to the internet with all your individual links opening in their own tab!

If you click on the above picture, it will take you to the tabs/links I found helpful in getting started with podcasting.

If you keep track of your sharetabs that you create, you can edit them in the future to add to them or delete as necessary – the link never dies.

This now makes giving your classes several links at a time for them to review much easier! You no longer spend half your class time correcting mistyped links and more time having fun!