Google: The Way to Go?

Not too long ago, I was on the phone with my 5 year old nephew Liam, telling him that I had uploaded some cool pictures of him from soccer and baseball. I explained that when his big brother came home, he would show them to him. (I had posted them on Facebook.) I guess he wanted to see them immediately, so he asked me, "Can't I just press Google?" Amazing.

I spent some time recently poking around Google which is so much more than a search engine. I have used Images, but that's about it. The Google Calendar syncs with just about everything and Google Docs is very impressive. Since we have serious filters at work,  and cannot get Blogspot or so many other sites, Google Docs might be the way to go for creating a space for members of the departments to save and share documents and exchange ideas and lessons. I already have about 30 Articles of the Week I was thinking about putting on a CD for teachers to use with their classes. I know, how archaic. It probably would make more sense to save them in a Docs file for all to access. Plus, there are so many excellent podcasts available! I just subscribed to This I Believe, which comes with a curriculum unit for middle school and high school students. This would be a perfect unit for the students; they could listen to podcasts, read some of the 70, 000 TIB essays submitted since the program's inception, and write their own TIB essays.

I guess the next step would be to create a group blog in Google, then forego the print newsletter  Curmudgeon and publish it via Google. Although,  I should probably introduce that next year. Volume I (print), Volume II (electronic). While these may seem simple things to implement, in my experience, teachers are incredibly resistant to change. Getting them to actually access these resources via Google? That's another post.