Further to my recent post about the 100 ways Google can make you a better educator, Google themselves have published a comprehensive overview of support, tips and tutorials for using the Google apps in education all neatly presented on a LiveBinder. This will be an essential bookmarked site I’d imagine for any teacher who is keen on exploring ways of using these apps with educative purpose. There’s a host of tutorials in the form of video and text, some of which are also graded for beginner, intermediate and advanced. This binder brings together all of the things that you’d otherwise have to delve off into a number of areas to find – and is yet another great example of how LiveBinder can be used so effectively.

While on the topic of using Google in education, yesterday’s post on the RWW titled
When K-12 Moves to the Cloud highlights a point I made in the earlier post – that the use of cloud-based applications such as Google Apps is about more than simply saving money. In their article, the RWW team summarise what is happening in various places in the US, highlighting the fact that in addition to the obvious cost-saving and technical support benefits that come from this move, there is also an emerging cultural shift in schools.

Signs of this culture shift highlighted in the article include:

• increased collaboration between teachers and schools
• participation in personal learning networks for professional growth and development
• resource sharing, including the collaborative development of open-source text books

As Howard Chan, the Director of Technology for K-12 public charter schools in San Diego, California, is quoted, “having a centralized depository for disseminating information has changed the culture of our school. Now there is a platform for distributing information in real time and archiving information for future use.”