GoogleFest

Learning at School in Rotorua provided another opportunity (excuse!) to spend some time collating the multitude of Google tools, apps, ideas and tips which have come my way. The GoogleFest workshop was billed as "an opportunity to explore a number of Google tools, share what we have tried and gather ideas to take back to our own schools". About 50 people turned up and fortunately the wireless held up for us all to go online and have a play.

This post is simply a directory to some of the resources I shared during this session. I created a Google Doc and shared it publicly so the participants could access the links quickly.

Many of the ideas and resources shared have come from the amazing GCT community. So thanks to Lisa Thumann, Lucy Gray, Kern Kelly, Molly Schroeder, Cindy Lane and Tom Barrett for their resources.

We have particularly appreciated the inspiration of Jerome Burg who generously shared and facilitates his Google Lit Trips concept. If you haven't tried it, you are missing a really engaging way to hook students into reading. Over on the Google Doc there are many links to YouTube videos and other easy to follow tutorials about aspects of creating Lit Trips using Google Earth.

One of the best ways to keep up-to-date with the latest on Google is via Twitter. You can follow all of the various Google 'department' tweets (eg Sites, Maps, Earth etc). I also have a column in my Tweetdeck which displays all the tweets which include the word 'Google'. There is no way I read even a fraction of them, but many times I have glanced at it and seen yet another user sharing a cool idea.

Please add any Google resources and ideas you use via the comments :)