Will Google+ Be a Real Benefit to Teachers?

If you’re a teacher or in the US parliance, an 'educator' and you haven’t yet started experimenting with Google+ you may be missing out on a useful tool.

Google+ is being promoted as the next best and the most amazing, awesome collaboration tool. To be more moderate, it may help you promote your classes in a better way.

There are some good ways to think about this and how you get started. Possibly the best function of Google+ is it's availability and the savings on promotional overheads. The tool is open to anyone with a Google Gmail account and is free to users.

Setup an Account

First connect to Google+ at www.google.com and establish an account using your existing Gmail account or follow the online instructions to make a new account.

Making a Class Circle

Let's look at one of the basic functions that may assist teachers i.e. building a class environment and populating this with like minded and motivated students /people.

After you’ve set up your account and published your profile, go to your Circles page and start adding people in your class to the circle.



When you have it all populated, share it with the people in that circle, so they can all add each other to the same circle.

Do this by clicking “share this circle” in the upper right hand side of your screen. (If you have any questions, leave them in the comments section and Google+ promise to sort you out.)

Sharing your Lesson Plans

You can post your lesson plans to your circle without sharing them to the outside world. Simply click the X on other circles and sharing options like “public” and “extended circles” until your special class circle is all that’s remaining, and you have your privacy.


Now, post lesson plans, share YouTube videos, photos, and more via links. You can even do location-related homework by having people post location check-ins to the circle as a response to your plans.

Conclusion
I hope this posting has been of some assistance to you and wish you and your students great success for the future.

Google speech recognition software on Android

If you've tried speech-recognition software in the past, you may be skeptical of Android's capabilities. Older speech software required you to talk in a stilted manner, and it was so prone to error that it was usually easier just to give up and type.


Today's top-of-the-line systems—like software made by Dragon—don't ask you to talk funny, but they tend to be slow and use up a lot of your computer's power when deciphering your words. Google's system, on the other hand, offloads its processing to the Internet cloud.


Everything you say to Android goes back to Google's data centres, where powerful servers apply statistical modeling to determine what you're saying. The process is fast, can be done from anywhere, and is uncannily accurate.


You can speak normally but if you want punctuation in your email, you've got to say "period" and "comma", you can speak for as long as you like, and you can use the biggest words you can think of. It even works if you've got a regional accent.

How does Android's speech system work so well? The magic of data. Speech recognition is one of a handful of Google's artificial intelligence programs—the others are language translation and image search—that get their power by analysing impossibly huge troves of information.


For the speech system, the data accesses a large number of voice recordings. If you've used Android's speech recognition system, Google Voice's e-mail transcription service, Goog411 (a now-defunct information service), or some other Google speech-related service, there's a good chance that the company has your voice somewhere on its servers and it's only because Google has your voice, and millions of others, that it can recognise mine.

Read more here: Google speech recognition software for your cellphone actually works. - By Farhad Manjoo - Slate Magazine

Tools for Autism - Project Spectrum and Google SketchUp

Google SketchUp has come to be recognised as a powerful tool in the autism and Aspergers communities, enabling individuals to design, communicate, and collaborate in fun and interesting ways.

Designing with SketchUp can help increase success in school and even improve social skills. SketchUp can also help foster productivity and independence, paving the way for careers in architecture, interior design, game design, film and stage design, urban planning, education - a world of possibilities!

Google established Project Spectrum as a result of working with the Autism Society of Boulder. They observed that children who had limited verbal communication skills were using SketchUp to design intricate and interesting models, essentially projecting the ideas from their brains onto the computer screen.

Bonnie Roskes has teamed up with Project Spectrum to create the following projects, which can be downloaded and used by anyone in the autism / Aspergers community.

More projects are planned, and your feedback, suggestions, and comments are very valuable!

Toy Shop

Collaboration and Communication

In this fun project, a group of students work together to fill an empty toy shop. The students decide among themselves who will be responsible for each toy category.

Each student finds his or her models in the 3D Warehouse, then the group comes back together to place their models into the shop. Comments and feedback from each student help foster a collaborative experience.

Download the Toy Shop project (PDF)



Dentist Office

Relieving Anxiety

Who doesn't get nervous about a trip to the dentist? But "rehearsing" your appointment ahead of time can help make the actual experience easier. It's easy to model the physical spaces using basic rooms, then find the necessary models in the 3D Warehouse.

This project shows two ways to "walk through" the model, gives suggestions for conversations about what will happen at the dentist's office, and also shows how to make the experience funny (imagine walking into the examination room and seeing Homer Simpson instead of your dentist).

Download the Dentist Office project (PDF)

More Free stuff for Kids Activities - click here!