Google - A Teacher’s Best Friend October 24, 2008
Posted by tbanaszewski in Teacher Tips.trackback
In a school of nearly 500 students and 50 teachers using over 350 computers, there are always plenty of tech-related questions. I think every teacher would love to have their classroom next to the IT department, but that's rarely how schools are configured. While you can't clone your building's go-to-tech-person (I don't like being referred to as "the tech guy"), every teacher does have access to Google. And that sometimes is even better.
Today's situation. I was trying to import video footage into iMovie. Something I've done more than a hundred times. But today the computer would not recognize the camera. I remember something like this happening last year. Our school's video camera records in PAL format instead of the NTSC format that I'm used to in the US. I spent 15 minutes trying to figure it out. Thought of asking the video teacher down the hallway, but he was in the middle of teaching a class. Where else can I turn to? Google. I enter "creating a PAL iMovie project" and get a list of links to forum replies from people who have experienced the same problem. Whenever you think you've got a unique computer problem, chances are very high that someone else in the world has solved it. Google can connect you with that person. I read over replies from three people and found my answer. And then I got even more than what I was looking for. Lennart Thelander created an empty PAL iMovie project and made it available for anyone to download. Three minutes later I launched it in iMovie 06 HD and resumed importing the footage for the project.
When I needed to learn how to create a green screen effect in Final Cut Pro, I Googled it and found an excellent YouTube tutorial from a college student that taught me exactly what I needed in just 20 minutes.
We tell students that technology is supposed to help them think creatively and critically about how to solve problems. I think that we need to push this same message to teachers. It's not enough to put technology in teachers' hands. We need to teach them how to use it to be more effective educators. That's a thorny issue, but I see teaching them how they can learn from Google and the vast resources out there on the web as a large part of my job, much larger than being "the tech guy."
Google Docs - another reason why Google should be a teacher's best friend. Even though they're still working out some bugs, I'm excited about where this set of tools is headed. This week, I wanted to create a quiz for students to take. Sure I could have used Survey Monkey, but I was curious to see what Google had to offer. In the Documents section of your Google account, create a New document and select Form. Very easy quiz option. Easy to analyze results. And of course there's a great YouTube video tutorial that someone has created to help walk you thru the steps of creating one.
Using Google Forms to Create a online Quiz
Google Docs in Plain English
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