Week 2: Google Drive

Hope you all had a glorious first official week of summer!

This week, we are going to spend a little more time getting to know Google Drive (formerly known as Google Docs).  Google Drive is part of our Google Apps for Education suite of tools.  You can access it by logging in to your BMS email and clicking "Docs" in the black bar across the top.  If you have already switched over to Drive, then your bar will say "Drive" instead of "Docs."  If you simply click my link above, you'll be asked to log in; be sure to use your full BMS email address for the userrname!

Google Drive is an online file creation and storage tool.  You can create most documents that you are used to making with Microsoft Office, including docs, spreadsheets, and presentations.  Why not just use Microsoft Office?  you make be asking.  Well, there are two main reasons:

1. Google Drive stores your files online so that you can access them from any computer with internet access (Each person has 5GB of non-Google file storage and an unlimited amount of Google file storage).

2. Google Drive allows you to share your files with others and work on them collaboratively!

For this week, your goal is to learn all that you can by exploring Google Drive.  Make a doc or a presentation or even a spreadsheet, and share it with someone else or a few people--you could ask your colleagues on Twitter!  (Sharing with a BMS colleague is very easy, as their email addresses are already in your address book).  Then, practice using the collaboration features, like highlighting and making comments on a certain section and chatting about the document within the creation area (on the right side).  Though you don't have to view the document at the same time as your collaborators in order for these features to work, it's fun to see someone typing in the document while you're looking at it!  In your document, you and your collaborators can discuss ways that you could use this tool in the classroom, with students or with colleagues. 

You can also download a desktop "client" for Google Drive that allows you to easily add files to your Google Drive storage area from your computer.  You can upload any file types to Google Drive, including photos and videos!  Give it a try!

If you have even more time to play, try this: collaborate in a Google Doc with Friedrich Nietzsche, William Shakespeare, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Emily Dickinson, Charles Dickens, and Edgar Allen Poe!  Click here to give it a try.

Also, here's a funny video spoof of Hall & Oates using a Google Doc to collaborate on the lyrics to a song.  It gives you a good visual of how the real-time collaboration can work.


If you get stuck, try to find the answers to your problem on Google's support page for Google Drive.   

Have fun and be sure to share your successes and struggles with us on Twitter!  You can see what all of your BMS colleagues are up to by clicking on the link on the right hand side of this blog called "List of BMS Twitter Users."  Just subscribe to the list!

Next week, we'll keep exploring Google Drive, but will shift our focus to Google Forms.  If you like using Survey Monkey, you'll love Google Forms!  Tweet with you soon!

Week 1: Edmodo

Summer has officially arrived, and one hallmark of every Bryn Mawr teacher's summer experience is, of course, summer reading! This year, we have joined forces with the summer reading team to bring you online discussion groups for each of the books using a tool many of you know and use already: Edmodo.

Edmodo is a secure place to connect and collaborate with others within a closed network. You can share links, videos, notes, and even Google Docs with fellow group members. Teachers can create new groups to use for class discussion or group work. The Upper School faculty should be quite familiar with this appication after using it for the Pirate Mapping game during this past school year. Edmodo was truly created with teachers and students in mind, and I think that you'll find many neat uses for this tool if you take the time to explore all that it offers. One example of this is that you can use Edmodo to connect with other educators far and wide to discuss particular subjects of interest to you by joining groups and communities that have already been established.

The first step to getting started in Edmodo, as with most online tools, is to create an account. To do this, go to http://edmodo.com and click the "I'm a Teacher" button to sign up. Answer all the questions there and then sign in.

The next step is to join the summer reading discussion group or groups of your choosing. When you're logged in to Edmodo, look on the left hand sign of the page for the "Groups" area and click on the link that says "Join." A box will pop up asking you for a Group Code. This is where you will enter the code for the group you'd like to join. If you'd like to be a part of more than one summer reading book discussion, you can join multiple groups--just enter one group code at a time and then click the "Join" link again to join the next group.

Here are the group codes for each discussion group:

Imagine: v7kawt

Now You See It: 3p34ha

The Cellist of Sarajevo: 19wfhz

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks: c6jxwj

The Other Wes Moore: 29wt8q

Each group has a discussion leader who will guide your group through a discussion over the summer. You can post notes to your group, as well as links to related articles or videos; you can also reply to other people's posts or questions.  Check in with your group from time-to-time to see what new ideas and information people are discussing! You can also tweet your thoughts about Edmodo as a discussion tool and tweet links to any interesting articles your group finds.

***LOWER SCHOOL TEACHERS: Just for you, we have created a Lower School iPad Exploration group on Edmodo for you to collect and share ideas, articles, and apps that you like.  Please be sure to join this group in addition to the summer reading group of your choice.  The code for you to join this group is: 2ytgt8.  Thanks!***

Welcome!

Welcome to Summer TECHsplorations 2012!  We'll be using Twitter again this year as a way to collect all of your TECHsplorations, and we will also house each week’s app/link/article here on this blog.  (So, even if you don't want to "tweet," you can still see what's going on in TECHsplorations by reading about it here).

There are a number of links to the right that will help you to get started and explain more about this year's program.

Most importantly, when you set up your twitter account (if you didn't do this last year), start following @emilyletras so that I can maintain an accurate list of all participants that everyone can use!

Have fun!