You can now sign up for an invitation to Google Wave. It is amazing! I cannot even come close to doing it justice. Just watch this video:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p6pgxLaDdQw

Sign up fast because you never know how long it will take to get the invitation.

This is an interesting little video that is showing how those annoying little security boxes on websites where you have to decode a funky looking word. By doing so, you are helping computers to decode obscured texts that Google scans for use on Google Books. Pretty cool.

This video was found at Lifehacker.com

From the Google Docs blog, I learned that the spreadsheets available on Google docs are now going to be more efficient when viewed on mobile phones. This is awesome for a number of reasons:

1. I don’t have a physical gradebook.
2. The server at my school has been known to be down from time to time, whereas Google does not have such a reputation.
3. With spreadsheets on my phone, I can keep my gradebook there. Therefore, when a student asks about a grade, I can whip out my phone (and thereby proudly revealing my nerdiness) to answer their questions.
4. Because these spreadsheets are on google’s server, I do not have to worry about losing them.

If you want to see how students are using Google Docs, check out the link and video below.
This video (from a series of videos about Google Docs on campus) features students discussing how Google docs have made them more effective.

Check out other posts dealing with Google here.

I often like to gather information from my students through electronic surveys — I like the ease of use and how it can visually show the data back to them. In the past, I have used Survey Monkey but recent changes in the Google Document Suite makes it so easy to create surveys and forms, gather the answers and then analyze the information that I have hung up my Monkey and gone to Docs.

You can read how to do this from Google itself (see the post) but it really is quite simple: create a form, ask questions, provide possible answers, embed or link to the survey, and get started. The responses get tallied in your Google Docs as a spreadsheet, but there is also a way to see the results as a visual chart.

So, how have I used this?

• At the start of the year, I gave out a brief survey just to get a sense of who my students were as an overall group, with questions ranging from interests and hobbies to how they use technology;
• I have used the form as a reflective writing device, having students think and write about a particular project. This now only gives me their thinking, but it also provides me with valuable feedback on aspects of the project that connected with them, or not.
• We used the form to gather ideas for student social action projects as a brainstorming session, then narrowed down the choices and plunked them into a survey. Students then voted on a particular project, which they have become leaders of at our school. The use of the tool allowed them to be in charge of the idea from start to completion. (See some of the ideas they generated for a proposed Teach the Teacher Day and results about a fundraiser activity)

I created this survey as a sample.

– Kevin

Google made it easy to embed in a site any book available at Google Book Search. You can add a fully-functional widget using this code:

<script type=”text/javascript” src=”http://books.google.com/books/previewlib.js”></script>
<script type=”text/javascript”>
GBS_insertEmbeddedViewer(’GkCpLIk7aisC‘,600,500);
</script>

You should replace GkCpLIk7aisC with the corresponding book ID, which can be obtained from the URL. See this example on the post at Google Operating System.

Post from Google Operating System

This project appears on the National WritingProject’s website.

For high school teachers and mentors who would like to capitalize on young people’s interest in the 2008 U.S. presidential campaign, Google and the National Writing Project have teamed up to create Letters to the Next President: Writing Our Future.

Letters to the Next President: Writing Our Future is an online writing and publishing project that invites young people to write about the issues and concerns they would want the next president to address and, with the support of their teachers, to publish their writing for a national audience.

During the presidential campaign, U.S. high school teachers and mentors guide students through the process of writing a persuasive letter or essay to the presidential candidates. Students’ work should encourage the candidates to give attention to issues and concerns that students feel are central to their future. Topics are chosen by the students themselves to reflect their specific personal, regional, and age-related interests, and teachers will be able to support student writing and publishing in a way that most directly fits their local curricula and educational goals.

Through the Letters to the Next President: Writing Our Future website (which launches in mid-September) and Google Docs , a free online writing tool, participating teachers can work with students to publish their work online for their peers, teachers, and parents, and for the public. And who knows, the future president may read their letters too.

Register Now!

Letters to the Next President: Writing Our Future is open to U.S. teachers and mentors working with students ages 13–18. The project requires parent/guardian permission (PDF) for students to publish their work on the Web and requires that students and teachers have Internet connectivity and use or create a free Google account.

Google accounts allow teachers and students to use Google Docs to compose, collaborate, edit, and share writing through Internet-accessible documents. The Letters to the Next President: Writing Our Future website provides a secure way for teachers to publish students’ publication-ready writing to a high-profile website intended to feature strong, well-reasoned, and persuasive writing by young people.

Interested teachers should read How to Participate and then register here by September 8. Please note, in order to register for this project, you must first have an account on NWPi.

Note: When you register for this project, you will be automatically signed up for an NWP discussion list specifically designed for this project. By default, messages to the discussion list will be sent to you via email. For more information about our discussion lists, and to change the email settings for a discussion, please visit our subscriptions page.

In light of the record mentioned in the post prior to this one, I thought I’d post the top 3 articles.  These three articles have brought almost 4,000 hits to this site alone. Thanks for helping so much Kevin!

Never Make a Study Guide Again  by Ben

Creating Sub-Gmail Accounts for Kids  by Kevin

Ides of March - 1 day= Pi: Math, English by Ben

Second life blew our minds with the creation of its 3D world because of its potential for changing online shopping experiences, international business, and online education. With its virtual classrooms, boardrooms, and malls, Second Life has even been the subject of investigations by the FBI because of places where users could actually go and make money via gambling.

I considered buying space on Second Life for my classroom, but then I was strolling through one of its malls and found a store with a sundry of items that one wouldn’t want students to stumble upon.

However, recently I discovered Google’s Lively. This is a new, seemingly safer alternative to Second Life. The good thing about it is how user friendly it is. The bad thing about it is that it does have an Atari/Zelda feel to it in the way you move from room to room. No matter, though, it will still create an interesting way to create class projects.

Lesson ideas:
*Have students create group web quests through which all of the info can be found in their particular room. They can then connect to another group’s room.

*Have a scavenger hunt kind of lesson where they move from room to room solving some problem with global warming or something of that nature.

*Have student create an art gallery that best depicts the vocabulary words for that week.

Anyway…here is a video from youtube about it.

While sitting in a workshop presented by Donald Leu, who *wrote Teaching with the Internet K-12: New Literacies for New Times, woman in the audience asked if it was true that one could use quotation marks and other symbols to limit search results. I was surprised by thew question because I thought this was common knowledge. However, the crowd gasped with amazement when he demonstrated how to do this.
Since this is a common feature to most search engines I decided it would be a good idea to post the list below. You can use most of these on any major search engine. (I even tried them out on Yahoo’s search engine.)

Therefore, when you are doing research with your students, help them limit their results by using these techniques. Who knows? They might even think you are cool when you tell them you can even use these techniques on facebook.com.

*Joining Donald Leu in authorship of this book is his wife, Deborah Diadium Leu, and Julie Coiro.
**This cheat sheet was found in THIS article at About.com.