Google Teacher Newsletter - Edition 2

[intelliot]

Google for Educators seems to be essentially an initiative to reach out to educators and provide Google resources for them to organize their information and make it more useful.

Greetings and welcome to the second issue of the Google Teacher Newsletter.

If you're like most teachers, it's been a busy school year for you so far. You're not the only one who's been busy, though; here at Google, we've been spending a lot of time meeting with teachers, administrators, and even some students, and using their feedback to make important changes to our site, Google for Educators. Visit us at www.google.com/educators and you'll see what we mean.

Most common among the comments we've been getting from teachers has been, "It's great that you guys put up this site, but we want a way to communicate -- both with you and other educators. And we don't want it to be via email -- we want an interactive community where we can share our thoughts, post our lessons, discuss current events, and just talk." In response to this feedback, we've created the Google for Educators discussion group; we invite you to join this community today, at http://groups.google.com/group/google-for-educators.

You also asked for more content created by teachers, for teachers. We sponsor a blog produced by our friends at WestEd called the Infinite Thinking Machine, and in response to this request, we've started to include some of the content from that blog on our front page. (You can view the full blog, which contains lots of educational video content, at http://www.infinitethinking.org.) We've also included some of the projects submitted by you in the classroom activities section of our site, at http://www.google.com/educators/activities.html.

Many of you wrote to thank us for giving you access to specific Google tools via our site, as well as ideas about how to use those tools in the classroom -- but pointed out that you also use some of our other products to help students, like Google Page Creator, Google News, and Google Groups. Thanks for letting us know about your interest in these products; we've added them to the "Tools for your classroom" section of our site, at http://www.google.com/educators/tools.html.

Since we started our educators initiative, we've conducted two Google Teacher Academies, one in the Bay Area and one in New York. 110 teachers visited us to learn techniques for using our tools in the classroom and to network with their fellow teachers. They also joined the Google Certified Teacher group -- one of the most popular discussion groups we've seen, and an inspiration for our new educators community. To learn more about the Google Certified Teacher program, please visit http://www.google.com/educators/gta.html Although we don't have a solid date for the next Google Teacher Academy, we plan on hosting one soon -- possibly in a region near you -- so please check the Google for Educators site often.

Lastly, we know the site hasn't changed much since you first saw it. That's going to change in coming months -- we're going to be updating the site regularly with added tools and teaching activities -- so please be sure to check in with us often. We look forward to continuing to help you access the information and tools you need to give students the best education possible, and as always we invite your comments and suggestions.

Cheers!
Cristin Frodella
Google K-12 Education Outreach

[paylasturka]

thanks intelliot..

[kplopjaison]

Mmmh! When I was doing my MBA, Google was my teacher....
I used to use the word 'Tutorial' with the topic I need to learn and Google get's it to me...
60% of the questions were out of syllabus .... and I managed to get 83-86%....good score....

[jetshing]

Yup,that's very practical and useful for us trainers.