...and I for one welcome our new lizard overlords.
Bill Ferriter talks about using Google Docs to pre-package digital materials, so students can use them in their digital projects. The main advantage, of course, is that they can spend more time working on the project, and less time looking for the perfect picture. (Always tremendously frustrating.) He also goes on to extol the virtues of collaboration, ease of use, and finding materials licenced for re-use (instead of downloading a picture, video, or sound bite that somebody else owns). In all, an excellent idea. Now if only I could convince my school to create Google accounts for my students....
Richard Byrne at Free Technology for Teachers points out that the Google Art Project, which had a huge scope to begin with, is now enormous. With Google Art Project, you can see works of art from museums all over the world. I've already used it a little bit in my Spanish classes, to show works by Picasso and Dali and Varo. Mr. Byrne points out something execllent: If you sign in using a Google account, you can create your own galleries and collections. Not only does this mean I can create galleries, so I don't have to go searching for the same 10 paintings all the time, but also that I can have my students create their own galleries based on themes. For my Spanish students: "Find me 10 pictures by Velazquez. Find me 10 art works created in the Romantic style. Find me 10 works about (or at least arguably about) the Spanish Civil War. Find me 10 works of people doing household tasks, and describe in detail what they're doing." For my English students: "Find me 10 works that have the same tone as the book we're reading. Find me 10 works on the topic of unrequited love / family / loneliness. Find me a work that you find stunning/beautiful/ghastly/confusing and write a page describing what it looks like, what you think/feel about it, what the artist was trying to conveigh; use descriptive adjectives/averbial phrases that express time/complex sentences." Now, if only I could convince my school to create Google accounts for my students....
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Next year all of our students will have Google accounts and we will be hiring a techology trainer to work with teachers in the classroom either through demonstration or training. It is exciting. I was able to budget 3 classroom sets of laptops or tablets for our science classrooms. Our science teachers are scared to move to a tablet and begin the researching and calloborating and get rid of the textbooks. You are correct, it is exciting time to be a teacher.
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