Google Drive Refresher & The Bigger Picture

Getting Google-y.  Peace out, Microsoft Office.

This school year has been a deliberate attempt for me to create entirely outside the Microsoft Office environment, sort of a personal goal.  As it stands, I have not yet opened Word, PowerPoint, or really even Excel anymore to CREATE (occasionally I paste large quantities of data in Excel to print it... maybe I'll give Google Sheets a try next time!).  Disclaimer: Keynote, Pages, and Notability for iPad are awesome, and I've created plenty with those, but still almost always end up converting and organizing in Google Drive for easy access and sharing purposes.

We recently held a brief session after school to offer some tips and useful features of Google Drive. Our school has been a "GAFE" (Google Apps for Education) school for about a year and a half at this point, and I believe we are just scratching the surface of the potential it has as a tool to positively impact teaching and learning. Our agenda for the hour-long session was simple, yet hopefully helpful to people wanting to feel more comfortable working, creating and sharing in the Google environment, and could use some reminders of the functionality within Drive.

Take a peek at the agenda here.

The Bigger Picture

It is always energizing for me to work with staff on this issue specifically (especially during a time of the year when I'm heavily involved with state testing), both because I truly enjoy every aspect of it, and I very much believe that education is headed in a direction in which mastery of these kinds of cloud-based tools will be paramount to inspiring a generation of students that are growing up with smartphones and iDevices glued to their persons, and they can search for any factoid you can imagine within seconds.

That's why it's exciting.

"Kids today" are not jaded and spoiled by too much technology, but they do need direction & digital citizenship lessons.  Through proper utilization of tools like Google Drive we can focus even more on teaching them HOW to sift through the rubbish, analyze quality sources, think critically and form their own opinions; ones which will define them as they grow educationally and become lifelong learners beyond the walls of our institution.

Thanks to the staff members that chose the option to check out our "refresher course", and to many that have invested quality time becoming accustomed to getting Google-y already!  For you Chrome users, the Chrome Web Store was just opened for us in the domain to explore - there are some GREAT free apps for education.

If you haven't yet, indulge me and stay up-to-date on this little blog experiment of mine. Also, do yourself a favor and create a Google+ profile ASAP with your personal Gmail account - many businesses/institutions don't have it turned on - , and follow me (and many others) to start exploring your own specific educational and technological interests.  Think of it as a smarter/nicer/cleaner/generally better version of Facebook.

Jump in. The water is nice. (Not to be confused with: "Drink the Kool-Aid, everybody's doing it!")

Cheers,
J