Google+Tools+and+Apps+for+Adult+Education

Google Tools and Applications have a variety of uses in adult education. Our goal for this workshop is to introduce you to some of the tools and applications that we think might be most useful to you, but feel free to explore any of them at your leisure. If you find good uses for others, please let us know what you used and how you used it, so we can share that information in our next workshop. Google for Educators

Google Apps for Education
Google Apps Education Edition includes:
 * **Gmail:** Email storage and search tools that help your students find information fast and instant messaging from right inside their accounts.
 * **Google Calendar:** Students can organize their schedules and share events and calendars with others.
 * **Google Talk:** Students can call or send instant messages to their contacts for free anytime, anywhere in the world.
 * **Google Docs:** Share documents, spreadsheets, and presentations. Collaborate in real-time with your team or with your whole school. You can publish final documents to the entire world, too.
 * **Google Sites:** Work together to keep related documents, web content and other information in one place, on one site.
 * **Google Video for education:** A video hosting and sharing solution that enables schools and other organizations to use video as an effective medium for internal communication and collaboration.

[|Google Apps Quick Tour]

Gmail
The cornerstone of Google Apps is Gmail. Using their online application, you can set up your domain with Google Apps Education Edition

Google Sites for a Class Web Site
Use Google sites to create a virtual classroom. Your site becomes a library where you post assignments, class content, calendar of events, or use it to post photos of your class. Then your students can get all the information they need in one place. Students can create their own sites to work on or manage group projects. Great for Project-Based Learning. They can add a blog using the Announcements page type to share and archive group updates. They can also embed relevant spreadsheets, presentations, documents, and videos so it will be the central place for all their project information.

The resulting site(s) is(are) fully searchable and you can control who accesses the information on your sites.

Google Docs (WordProcessing, Spreadsheets and Presentations)
Google Docs allows students to create documents individually or shared as a groups. They can control who sees their work and who does not. Google Docs also accepts most popular file formats, including those produced using Microsoft Office, so uploading existing files should not be a problem. Button bars and toolbars within the programs will be very familiar to users of other The really nice feature is that it has an "auto save" feature which eliminates much of the frustration of losing hours of work time.

Google Docs also allows for group collaboration on a project and this can be done from home as well as at school. So learning can take place at all hours, from anywhere. It also gives students a broader audience if they choose. No longer is the teacher the only one that can look at published work if the student allows. Peers and others on the Web can view finished work, which provides more incentive to do quality work. It also makes learning more interactive as the teacher can read work in process and make comments and suggestions for improvement.

Google Docs also improves classroom efficiency eliminating a lot of paper shuffling and organization, which leaves more time for teaching and learning. [|Google Docs in Plain English] [|Using Google Docs in the classroom: Simple as ABC] [|Teachers and Principals Talk About Google Docs]