Google Apps

A redesigned Google Drive!

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As you begin accessing your Google Drive to start the year, you may notice some changes. Google Drive has been redesigned and has undergone some changes over the summer months. Check out this video to learn more about the updates! Also read Google Guru’s post, 23 Google Apps Updates You Might Have Missed During July, and be sure to check out Google Guru on a regular basis for the latest and greatest Google news!

Google Courses for Educators – Online, Free, and a Great Learning Experience!

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Free, online, courses are now available through Google in Education. These self-paced courses share content via video tutorials and activities, and allow participants to view, review, and practice the concepts taught.

Course topics include Internet 101, Google Apps for Education Overview, Google Drive for Educators, Gmail for Educators, Chrome and Chromebooks for Education.

Click here to view the course descriptions and register! 

If anyone is interested in starting a small group/PLC team to engage with the online content and further develop ideas learned by meeting face-to-face before or after school or during common planning time for PIT time, please let me know! I would love to facilitate this for you!

Research Tools in Google Drive and Advanced Google Image Search

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Many times, students seek to find images or other multimedia to use in their project work. These projects are often shared and published online. It’s important for students (and teachers!) to understand how to safely and appropriately use others’ work they can find online, including shared photographs, video, audio, and text.

Check out the Copyright, Fair Use, and Creative Commons resource page on this blog to learn more about this important topic. I am happy to visit your class to share more about fair use and copyright topics with your students!

Google Drive Research Tools

When students create a new document in Google Drive, such as a new word processing doc to compose a piece of writing, they have access to tools to assist with their research. Read more about the Research Tools here. Students can choose from a Google information search, Image search, Scholar search for academic articles, and even access the Dictionary tool, right inside their document/presentation.

By choosing an Image search, students can further define the parameters of the search by making sure they choose the drop-down option under Filter image results by usage rights: Free to use, modify or share, even commercially. The images that appear in a search with this criteria marked will help ensure the images located are able to be reused in student projects.

Any work licensed with a Creative Commons license dictates how to generate this attribution.

Google Images Advanced Search

At other times, students may turn to Google Images to search for images. There is a way to filter the images returned in a Google search through the use of Advanced Search. Follow these directions to help your students use the Advanced Search in Google Images:

Advanced Image Search Tutorial

Here are some other links to websites that may help students in their searches for appropriate, free to use images in their project work:

http://pics4learning.com/

http://gogooligans.com/

http://www.kidtopia.info/

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Main_Page

 

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