Some Great Google Forms for use in the Classroom

I love Google and Google Docs and use them all the time. I recently found this article "70+ Google Forms for the Classroom".

The article has 10 different Google forms with ideas on how to use them and then an embedded presentation with another 60+ Google forms and how to use them in the classroom. Some examples include: Student information, guided reading, prior knowledge assessment, staff meetings and much more.

I use Google Docs Forms in my classroom to collect student information at the beginning of the year, as a survey for different parts of the course, to collect information and preferences on staff professional development needs and much more.

This is definitely a site worth checking out and seeing how Google Forms can help you out in your classroom.

Google for Educators - Resources for using Google in school

Google is looking for your ideas for Google Docs features

Google is looking for ideas from users for new features and ideas for Google Docs. This is your chance to get a feature you've wanted implemented.

Go to the Google Docs Blog to suggest your ideas. A lot of educators use Google Docs and I'm sure that there are some features that they'd love to have.

Google updates image search, goo.gl, and gmail with new features

Google has been busy this week with updates and new features to many of it's products and services. They updated Google Calendar's favicon to display the actual date instead of just "31", A Google A Day puzzle, and Google Docs received pagination and native printing. Now, there are three more updates from Google. These updates will be rolling out over the next few days.

1. Google Recent Image Search - Google's image search has increased the speed of indexing of images and highlights recent results by showing a small label below the image with the date the image was posted online. This can help when searching for a timely or newsworthy topic and wanting to see the newest images.

2. Goo.gl URL shortener gets new features - goo.gl is Google's URL shortening service. It has a lot of great features, described here, and just got some improvements. When you create a new short URL on the goo.gl site, the new URL text will be automatically highlighted to make it easier to copy to the clipboard.

One of the cool features of goo.gl is the dashboard where you can see past url's you've shortened and how many times someone has clicked on that shortened url. You can now remove items from the dashboard to only keep the ones you really want to track visible.

You can also now report goo.gl URLs that are for spam sites using goo.gl/spam-report.

3. “Don’t forget Bob” and “Got the wrong Bob?” are two Gmail Labs features that help prevent you from forgetting to include someone on an email, and sending a message to the wrong person with a similar name to the person you meant to email — like emailing Bob (your boss) instead of Bob (your friend).

As you type in your recipients, Gmail will automatically make suggestions based on the groups of people you email most often. When you see a suggestion to add a person you’ve forgotten, all you have to do is click on their name to add them.

Similarly, if you click on a suggestion to replace a mistakenly added recipient, the proverbial “wrong Bob” will be replaced by the right one.

All of these updates should make users of Google's products feel comfortable and reassured that Google will continue to support and improve the products that they've come to depend on.

Reference: Official Google Blog (and images are from here also)

(I've written a lot about Google's apps. I do not get paid or compensated by Google for this. I have found their apps to be well designed and easy to use.)

Pagination Comes to Google Docs! (and native printing)

Google Docs is a great resource that many people use. One feature that has been lacking is pagination - the ability to see the pages visually on your screen. Up until now, you would have to do a print preview to see how your document will layout on pages. Now, Docs has pagination and the printing in Docs has been improved also.

It is rolling out today and should be available to everyone by the end of the day. I do not have it as of this writing, but I'm looking forward to it.

With pagination, you will have visual page breaks while editing documents, so you can see how many pages and how the text formats onto each page. Headers will appear at the top of each page and footnotes will appear at the bottom of the proper page.

To set up pagination, you go to View > Document View > Paginated. You can also select "Compact" if you want to go back to the old view.

Along with pagination, Google Docs can now natively print from Chrome (will work with other browsers if those browsers implement the "same web standard" that Chrome is using.)

In the past to print, Google Docs would convert the document into a PDF and then that would open and print. Now, you will be able to print directly from the browser and the printed document will be formatted just like you see on the screen.

These improvements are great features that continue to improve Google Docs and make Docs even more useful.

They also show that Google is continually improving their products, which is great news for those of use that use their products.

UPDATE: As of 3:30pm, I have these new features in my account, so the roll out is going nicely.

(images from Official Google Blog since I don't have this function yet.)

Some updates and info on Google Buzz, Talk Guru and Docs

Google has made some updates and announced some information about three of it's products.

Google Buzz - Google admits that there were some problems with the Launch of Google Buzz in terms of transparency and user control and they have reached an agreement with the US FTC about these issues. They are looking for user comments before they make changes to Buzz though. They are making improvements and improving privacy and security settings.

Google Talk Guru - This is a new Google bot that let's you ask simple questions and you get the answers. You can get information about the weather, sports results, definitions and more via chat. It will work on chat applications that support Google Talk. It's free and easy to use.

Get started! Send a chat invitation to guru@googlelabs.com.
Google Talk Guru is an experimental service that allows people to get information like sports results, weather forecasts, definitions etc via chat. It works on many popular chat applications that support Google Talk.
To start using Google Talk Guru:
1. Sign into a chat client that supports Google Talk
2. Send a chat invitation to guru@googlelabs.com or click the link "Sign in and invite myself to chat with Guru" at the bottom of this page.
3. Find guru in your contact list and send chat queries to guru using the examples below:
Sport scores: score arsenal
Weather: weather Nairobi
Calculate: 123 * 45
Currency: 120 KES to USD
Definition: define laptop
Translation: translate earth to French
Web result: web Mount Kenya
Help: help translate

Sport scores:	score arsenal
Weather:	weather Nairobi
Calculate:	123 * 45
Currency:	120 KES to USD
Definition:	define laptop
Translation:	translate earth to French
Web result:	web Mount Kenya
Help:	help translate

Google Docs - Google is testing a pagination feature. Currently, to paginate your Google Doc, you have to use print preview which takes time and takes you away from your document. With pagination, you will be able to just go to "View > Document view > Paginated" and it will show you your document as it would print. You will still be able to go back and use the compact view.
No mention of when it will be available.

You can find out what else is new in Google Docs here. http://www.google.com/google-d-s/whatsnew.html

Google Docs Viewer adds more formats

Google Docs viewer is a feature that allows users to view different file formats in Google Docs. It is also integrated into Chrome and Gmail, allowing you to view attachments without downloading them. Viewing documents online is a nice way to read or view something without downloading it to your computer.

Google Docs Viewer has been used to view PDFs, Microsoft Word Documents (DOC, DOCX) and PowerPoint Presentations (PPT, PTTX). Now, there are 12 more file types added to Docs Viewer.

Microsoft Excel (.XLS and .XLSX)
Microsoft PowerPoint 2007 / 2010 (.PPTX)
Apple Pages (.PAGES)
Adobe Illustrator (.AI)
Adobe Photoshop (.PSD)
Autodesk AutoCad (.DXF)
Scalable Vector Graphics (.SVG)
PostScript (.EPS, .PS)
TrueType (.TTF)
XML Paper Specification (.XPS)

In Gmail, there is a "view" link that will appear if the attachment is a supported file type.

You can also now upload these file types to Google Docs and then share them with others.

This is a great feature that allows online viewing of different file formats without needing to download the files or have specific software.

Here is a standalone page for using Google Docs to view a file: (just enter the file url)
http://docs.google.com/viewer

Living in the Cloud - I'm ready for Chrome OS -Update

Chrome OS is all the rage right now in the tech circles. Google has released a very early version to certain people installed on their CR-48 laptop. Chrome OS basically takes everything to the web and, for all intents and purposes, turns an OS into a browser, and doesn't do much on the actual device. To be able to take advantage of this, you have to have a lot of your resources as web apps or web sites.

I'm hoping to be one of the lucky ones to get a CR-48 to test out and evaluate. I'm pretty well set in the cloud as it is now. The only thing I'm still using on the computer is PowerPoint. But, I'm moving most of my presentations to either Google Docs or Prezi.

Chrome Web Browser (currently running 9.0.597.19 beta)

1. Home email - my home email, through my cable internet service is web mail.
2. School email - web mail, through Microsoft Exchange
3. Gmail - secondary email and used for my Google accounts - love the fact that it keeps multiple email replies together in a conversation.
4. School student data system - attendance, information, gradebook - all web based (PowerSchool)
5. Evernote - notes, lesson plans, and so much more - web based
6. Blogger - web based blogging platform - this blog and my class blogs
7. Google Sites - class website and reference web site with links, resources, and files
8. iGoogle with Google Reader, Google Bookmarks, Google Notebook, Google Calendar, Google Tasks, Google Contacts...all web based.
9. Picasa - online photo storage
10. Google Chrome extensions and web apps:

Tweetdeck web app
Clip to Evernote
Aviary screen capture and edit
Google URL shortner
Bookmark to Diigo
Chromey calculator

11. Online scientific calculator

12. Dropbox - cloud file storage and sync to access my files

13. Google Docs - online office suite - uploading my PowerPoint files and videos to Docs and YouTube

14. Aviary - online graphics, photo and detailing suite.

15. Prezi - very cool, online, presentation program

That's just the main things I use on a daily basis. I really don't need to access a hard drive or have local storage of apps/software or files to be able to do my work. It also means I have access to all of my stuff no matter where I am: home, school, at a different computer in the district, or even on my Palm Pre+. I can access everything from anywhere.

What I really like about Chrome OS is that it would be perfect for education. (I wrote about that here).

What about you? Can you live in the cloud and still get things done?

UPDATE: Very interesting. I got home on Friday (the day I originally wrote this post) and UPS shows up with a Google Chrome OS CR-48 notebook for me. I will be posting a review this week, so stay tuned. So far, I really like it.

Cloud File Storage, Sync, Backup

With the recent announcement by Google that users will soon be able to upload any type of file to Google Docs (up to 250MB each, with 1GB of free storage, additional storage for a fee), I figured I would revisit the topic of cloud file storage. There are a variety of services out there, all with different options and features.

Google Docs - you can upload any type of file (up to 250MB each) and you get 1GB of storage free. You can purchase additional storage at $0.25/GB/year, which is a good deal. There is no automatic sync built in. Google Gears can currently sync your Google Docs so we'll have to see what will happen with the new file types. There are also some 3rd party applications that you can use (like GDocBackup, which I use.)

Dropbox is a service that allows you to sync your files on your computer with their system as a backup. This also allows you to access the files anywhere. You can also sync the files across multiple computers. This means that you have automatic backup of your files and 24/7 access to your files. I have it set up to sync a folder on my home computer and school computer so I don't have to worry about having multiple versions or forgetting a flash drive.

There are also Dropbox apps for iPhone, Android, iPad and there is one coming for Blackberry. There is an independent app for Palm webOS, but you can also access the mobile site from any web-enabled phone. Imagine being able to access all of your files on your smartphone!

One feature that is very nice is the fact that it works with network drives like we use in my district. Some of the other cloud file storage and sync systems can't work with network drives. I was very happy to see this was able to be done with Dropbox.

UPDATED 11-10-2010!

SugarSync - This is my main service. What's great about Sugarsync is that you can have it back up your files on their server, and sync the files among multiple computers. So, my files on my home computer are synced to my laptop and my school computer. You can also access these files through any web browser, and there are apps for smart phones. You can even access them with a mobile web browser if you don't have an app. You get 2GB (UPDATED 5GB free as of 11/10/10) for free and there are fee based plans with more storage (next level is $4.99/month for 30GB). I can access my files anywhere, on any device, which makes it very convenient. You select the directories that you want to be backed up. The "Magic Briefcase" is the directory or folder you pick to be automatically backed up and synced. As soon as I save a file to that directory, it is uploaded to their servers.

The Websync feature is also nice. If you are accessing your files through the website, you can select "Edit with websync" and a Java program will download a temp copy of your file, allow you to edit and save it and then upload the new version. You can also share files with others through email or the web.

Sugarsync came in very handy for my wife. 1 week after setting it up on her computer, her hard drive died. Completely dead and no data was recoverable. If it wasn't for Sugarsync, she would have lost over 2 weeks of work (since her last backup). The automatic sync and backup is wonderful.

Zumo Drive - is another sync and sharing service with similar features to Sugarsync and Dropbox. I use this also. A great feature is being able to stream music from Zumo Drive to your mobile device. There is a free 2GB version. Zumo Drive actually works and looks like another drive on your computer. 25 GB is $6.99 / month.

Box - is similar to the others. The free version only has 1GB of storage, but you can purchase more storage ($5.99 per month for 5GB - not great!)

What do you think about these?

What do you think about cloud storage?

Are there other services that you would recommend?

SugarSync Review

Cloud Computing

Blogs, Wikis, Docs - which is best for your class

Blogs, Wikis, Docs is a great resource for teachers who are trying to decide when and how to use these tools. The author has created a chart listing the nature, collaboration, updating ease, benefits, drawbacks, and examples of each tool in education. If you are thinking of using one of these tools in your classroom, this site is a great place to start.

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