Module 4: Gmail, Calendar, Task

Another great module this week! This module makes me very eager to encourage our administration to become a Google school. It will be my goal to share with them the many possibilities that Google holds because I really think this could help our school-wide communication with each other and with our community. In this module, I learned that Gmail certainly is a "full" component with many possibilities. In Gmail, I really like how there are labels! This will really help me organize information. In Calendar, I really like how you can link events to it and are able to invite people. I think this would be a great way to communicate with families.

Those of you who use Google in your school, are the parents open to all of this technology? I wonder if parents would check their email regularly so this system could be effective.

I also want to know if this calendar will sync to Apple products? For my personal use, I always use Apple because I love how all of my devices will sync to each other. But since we do not have Macs at school it would be so nice to make everything sync.

Module 3: Google+ and Blogger

I look back and Module 3 and again, it just astonishes me that there is so much more to Google than Google search. I have to laugh because during the introduction part of this class, I labeled and thought of myself as a mediocre Google user.  As we get into things, it is very apparent that there is so much more to Google than what meets the eye on the initial google.com home screen. I had no idea what Google+ was before this module and I found the information very helpful but a little overwhelming. There is a lot of great “stuff” crammed into one tool. I almost look at it like this… Google+ seems to be Facebook, Pinterest, and LinkedIn all in one spot. I am not sure if I like that yet because I am so used to the separate websites and in my brain that is how everything is organized. I think I need to take small steps and explore each piece before putting it all together.

With over 10,000 pins, you can easily say I am a Pinterest fanatic and so as I as going through the module, the “Community” portion of Google+ really sang to me! I think this tool will be great for collaboration with other teachers. I have already joined several communities such as “Kindergarten Korner” and “Technology in Education” and have already seen several useful posts.  Does anyone know if we can save these posts/ somehow? That is one aspect of Pinterst that I love because I can always pin items and save it to use later. For example, today I saw cute nursery rhyme videos and would like to save them for later use but have no idea how to do so??

Even though I think Google+ will be great for me, I do question how my Kindergarten students can use this. I think this tool is too complicated and obviously they cannot even have a gmail account until they are 13. So for now, I think I will stick to just using Google+ for myself and will focus on finding great ideas on the site to then share with my students.

With that said, I did see a post today that really did inspire me to do more with integrating technology into my classroom. A teacher had asked if any experts on dinosaurs would mind Skyping in with their class. I thought that would be a great way to hit a high SMAR level and would be so fun! I would be interested to see if he get’s anyone to respond and is successful with his post. What a great opportunity that would be! My students would love to bring the outside world to them! Of course, this would transform the students learning and in my opinion, they would be at the modification level of the SMAR model. 

As far as Blogger, this is a tool that I am a little more familiar with. When I was in college, one of our assignments was to create a blog on children’s literacy. Even though I do not use this blog, I still go back and explore the blogs that I had followed and saved to my Reading List. Some of the blogs out there are amazing and WOW some people put a lot of time and effort into them! I always seem to pick up great ideas and I love how a lot of the content that they share is either linked to their Teachers Pay Teachers store or you are able to download the resources right there.

Again, I am not totally sure how I can use Blogger with my Kindergarten students. Maybe this can be an easier way for me to communicate what we are doing with families? At the beginning of the year, I struggled with finding a safe, private, and easy way to share all the wonderful pictures I take throughout the year with my Kinder families. I settled with using Shutterfly, which does have a classroom website component.  I do enjoy because it is very easy for me to take a picture on my phone and then have it uploaded to our classroom website. Not sure if Blogger can do the same things or give me the same benefits. Opinions? Thoughts?

Overall, I think I have concluded that these tools shared this past week are going to really help me as an educator grow and stay open to new ideas. I believe education is always changing and evolving and we owe it to each other to always share our findings and to collaborate.