Thing 28 - Anything Goes Google

I looked at Google Sites, Google Tour and 360, Google slides and Google free image sites.

Sites, Slides and free image sites were in relation to a project that we were putting together for a school expo.

Google Sites

 I decided to use it for my book club to see what tools were available and how difficult it was to work with. Like many Google programs, it was simple to set up and easy to add basics but limited as far as I could see for anything more complex.  For example, I wanted to add a table for books read that I could update and I had a heck of a time. I did some work arounds but I may try to investigate more later.

 

I then created a Google Site for the School Expo with pages for Grade levels and Programs.

Same issues and I decided to use some other programs to accomplish the same things. I think this was useful for the book club and I could use it for student work because of the easy learning curve. Below is the screen shot of the cover of the web page – the image of the school and programs is a screen shot of a GoogleDrawing that I am going to use for the expo with interactive tabs.

 

 

Google Tours fascinated me with the idea of using maps and info to create “trips” that could engage the students.

I used something from my own experiences to try it out and it was fun. We went 6 weeks cross-country on our honeymoon (too long ago to tell.) I recreated the route and had a lot of fun remembering people and places. I noticed that the locations were not exact. For example, I started at my house and the pin was down the street (have to investigate that issue further.)

You can make it very interactive and I was thinking of having the students create one for the Appalachian Trail.  We use Accelerated reader in the school and we made a map of the trail. The students make their way up the trail by getting AR points (see below.) I am thinking of having each of them pick a state that the trail touches and have them research the state and then create tours of their state.

 

 

Google slides

Another Google product that I checked out for the school expo. I have a million pictures in Google photos and I wanted create a power point. I found an article that explained if you had two extensions, Save to Google Drive and DriveSlides. With these two extensions you can create a folder on your drive and then go to photos and pick which photos to add to that folder. Then you use Drive Slides to automatically create a power point of that folder. Saved me a lot of work.

Finally

Google Free Image Sites

Through this I found a list of many sites with free images. I put this in my OneNote folder for easy reference.

Conclusion:

Google has come up with products for just about everything and all of the ones that I used here and as part of other Cool Tools are free. Most of them have some limitation and interesting functions. They do seem to be coming up with newer updates for most of them, I imagine based on feedback.