Reacton to Google Camp

While I wish I had checked my calendar more carefully and gone to all three days of Google Camp at the high school, I'm glad that I got to go to two out of the three days that it was offered; I learned quite a bit more than I expected to.

Some of my take-aways from my time at Google Camp 2014:

• There are so many add-ons that you can get from Google to put into your docs or sheets, some of the ones that I downloaded (directly from my Google Doc, it's all integrated) include: Easy Header and Footer, Easy Bib, Template gallery, Kaizena (this one might just get its own post), and these are just from Docs, I added eight more into my sheets add-ons.
• There are so many ways to communicate with your students and parents using Google Apps for Education (think, calendar, gmail, Docs, etc.) that I've never even considered. 
• I've used Google Forms this past year, but I had no idea just how much you can do with them.  Again, this could use its own post as they offered three levels of classes on Forms alone.
• As you can tell, I now have a blog and a website for technology support that I got to make at camp...in a room full of educators and tech people, talk about a useful workshop.
• Using Google Earth and Google Maps for taking students to far off places.  I used Google Earth before in science class, but I never thought to use Maps (unfortunately, because of using Chromebooks, our students can't use Google Earth unless we take them to a lab.)

As I said above, I'll be writing more posts specifically on each of the take-aways going into much more detail; until then, go ahead and explore some of features that I listed, it's not like you're going to break anything ;)

Let the Games Begin!

Welcome back Lakeview teachers!

I'm trying something new this year in an attempt to spread around some of tech knowledge that I've been picking up over the last year or two.  I've been at the Google camp at the high school for the last two days (in fact, I'm creating this blog in one of the workshops) and I've been picking up a lot of great tips that I'll be sharing over the next few weeks.

I'm also creating a district web-page called ed-tech where I'll be putting much of this information in a more traditional layout allowing teachers to search by subject, or grade level.  Right now, it's pretty empty but look for more material as the start of school approaches.

Enjoy the rest of your summer!