Google has just announced Google Play. Google Play will combine the Android Market, Google Music and the Google eBookstore. Google is describing Google Play as a "digital entertainment destination" combining apps, games, movies, music and books into one place.

All of your musics, movies, books and apps are stored online, always available on any device through Google Play. Google Play stats:

Store up to 20,000 songs for free and buy millions of new tracks
Download more than 450,000 Android apps and games
Browse the world’s largest selection of eBooks
Rent thousands of your favorite movies, including new releases and HD titles

The move starts today and the Android Market will get upgraded on Android Phones and Tablets over the next few days. Video, books and music apps will be upgraded to Google Play Movies, Google Play Books and Google Play Music apps. The music, movies, books and apps you’ve purchased will continue to be available to you through Google Play.

Yesterday was Safer Internet Day 2012. As part of this, Google posted some great internet safety resources on their Public Policy Blog. There was a new service listed: ThinkB4U. Google is describing it as a "digital literacy portal" that combines interactive videos with expert advice on online safety.

The site opens with a video about the Parkers, a family living in the digital age. Then there are separate videos about different topics. The site has separate menus for students, educators, and parents and addresses online safety in different ways for each audience.

Topics range from digital distraction, online shopping, online scams, research and information literacy, cyber-bullying, digital footprints, texting, sharing online, and effective digital communication. These topics are addressed in each menu, but approached differently for each audience.

I highly recommend ThinkB4U to all teachers to share with their classes, students, colleagues, friends, and parents of students.

http://www.thinkb4u.com/



Related:


Safer Internet Day 2012

Internet Safety Resources - help students stay safe online

Discovery Education Web 20.11 - great internet safety resources.

Google Good to Know - online safety and data info

Google Family Safety Center - help promote safety online.

Why I Use Google's Products as an Educator

DemoSlam is a very cool site from Google that has all kinds of different technology demonstrations and let the viewer choose their favorite.

You can view the champs and all of the demos created. There are some great demos that can be used by teachers and students alike such as one on how to use Google Docs to create a presentation, and on how to use Google Video Chat.

The coolest part of the whole thing is that ANYONE can create a tech demo using the tools and resources provided. That means this can be used by teachers to create demonstrations to help their students, or by students as a way to demonstrate what they have learned. This is the kind of assessment that lets students demonstrate content knowledge, technology skills, collaboration and teamwork if they work on a team, creativity and problem solving. These are the skills they need for college and the future.

Check it out! http://www.demoslam.com/


Related:

10 Important Skills Students Need for the Future

10 Tech Skills Every Student Should Have

Google for Educators Resources

It's a well known fact that engineering is dominated by men. A group of women at Google in Israel is trying to change that through a program they started in 2008 called "Mind the Gap!". This program encourages girls to pursue math, science and technology education and careers. Girls visit Google's office and tech conferences to talk to female engineers and get more interested in engineering. Data shows participants are more likely to go into STEM fields than those who didn't participate.

You can read more at the projects homepage: http://cse.proj.ac.il/index_units.htm 

This is a great program and I hope more companies will look at doing this to help encourage STEM education and careers.


Source:

http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2012/02/mind-gap-encouraging-women-to-study.html

Google has announced the Generation Google Scholarship for current high school seniors planning on studying computer science in college in the US or Canada. Recipients will receive scholarship money as well as being able to attend Google's Computer Science Summer Institute.

This is a great opportunity for students to get a scholarship to help with funding their education and get valuable experience in computer science.

The application deadline is February 10, 2012.

Google is once again hosting a Doodle 4 Google contest for K-12 students in the US. Students create a doodle of the Google logo based on this years topic "If I could travel in time, I'd visit...". The winner gets their design on the Google homepage and gets a $30,000 college scholarship along with a $50,000 technology grant for their school.

The theme, "If I could travel in time, I'd visit..." could mean visiting past, present, or future setting. Last year's contest had over 100,000 entries, so competition is fierce. There will be one winner per state and then from those 50 State winners, the 5 National Finalists and the National winner will be chosen.

This year the winning Doodle will also appear on a special edition Crayola 64 crayon box!!

To enter, you just need to submit your child's or student's artwork by March 20th with a signed and completed entry form. 

There will be some celebrity judges along with the Google employee judges. They will determine the State finalists. On May 2nd, the State finalists will be up for public vote.

Being a finalist is pretty cool and all 50 state finalists will get flown to New York city for the national awards ceremony on May 17th. The winning Doodle will appear on May 18th and all of the 50 state winning doodles will be displayed at the New York Public Library.

Complete rules, prizes, and registration information is available at the Doodle 4 Google site.

This is a great way to get students thinking creatively and coming up with some great ideas, as well as having a chance to win a scholarship.

Yesterday, I wrote a post entitled "Alternatives to Google's web services and apps" in which I listed a variety of services and apps that do what Google's tools and apps do for people who may not want to use Google's. I use Google's tools and apps extensively though, and here's why.

Google used to have a great 3D human anatomy resource called Google Body Browser. It was an interactive way to explore the human body. It's been described as "Google Earth" for the human body.

Google shut it down when they shut down Google Labs, but Zygote, the company that developed it for Google, has brought it back as the Zygote Body.

The site is new and you need to use a browser and OS that supports webGL. Most new browsers support this, but Windows XP does not. (for more information on webGL, go here.)

What's really neat about Zygote Body, is that you can hide/shade different body systems to explore in more detail. You can move the image around in 3 dimensions, zoom in and out, and get a really good view of anatomy. You can even search for body parts and turn the labels on and off.

There is also an Android app on the way.

Google, one of my favorite resources as an educator, has another great resource for students and teachers.

The Google Digital Literacy Tour is a curriculum developed by Google and iKeepSafe that educators can use in the classroom to teach online responsibility to students.

It is a fun, interactive curriculum with hands-on activities and scenarios and is broken into 3 parts. Each part as PDF downloads for educators and students, along with lessons and videos. There is a guidebook for the teacher, along with videos and presentations.

The three parts are: Detecting Lies and Staying True, Playing and Staying Safe Online, and Steering Clear of Cyber Tricks.

This is a great resource to use with students as you teach them cyber-skills and computer use. It is also a great resource to share with adults who may not know enough about cyber-safety and use.\


Related:

Google Resources for Educators

10 Important Skills Students Need for the Future

Google Books, Google's service that has thousands of books available, has added offline viewing capability to the desktop app when you use Chrome. This feature has been available or the Android and iPhone apps for a while.

This would be great for schools who want to use Google Books instead of buying paper books. Many of the classics are available here.

You must use the web app to access the books offline.

Google Good to Know is another great resource from Google. Good to Know has information and tips for internet safety, how your data is collected and used online, how Google uses data, and how to manage your data and what you share with web sites and Google.

This is a great resource for everyone and educators can use this to help students be more safe online and more knowledgeable about online data.

Google Translate is a great tool for education. I use it to translate papers, notes, and web pages for students and parents. I also use it to translate things into English for myself and my students use it to help them.


The Google Translate app for Android, which already has some cool features like speech to text translate, and back again, including a speech-to-speech conversation mode, now has a handwriting recognition feature that works with 7 languages. The languages include Chinese, Japanese, English, French, Italian, German and Spanish.

This is another great tool for ELL and Language arts classes, as well as anyone needing some translations done.

The iOS app is not yet update with this feature.

Google's Android team has launched a new Android Training site to help develops create better Android apps.

It's a free and includes a great list of topics and "classes" to help developers along with a community forum.

This is a great resource for computer science classes to use to help their students create apps.

I also love the logo.

Google Doodles are always fun, creative, and educational. When a new one comes out, it spreads online pretty quickly, especially the interactive ones.

Now, Google has a newly revamped Doodle site where you can go see all of the Doodles, including from other countries.

Teachers could use these Doodles to intro a unit or get students started on a topic or even have them create their own as a project.

Check out all the Doodles here.

Google has added another great education resource to it's portfolio, College Tips.

College Tips has tips, products, and services to make life easier for college students, and college bound students. This is a great site for high school students applying to college, current college students, and college seniors starting their job hunt.

There are lots of tips and students can share their own tips with each other.

Some of the tips: getting organized, staying on schedule, having a professional email address (vs. Imawesome etc.), campus guides, search tips and much more. The tips are organized by category: "Prospective College Students", "Current College Students", and "College Seniors".

There are some great tips and ideas here. The tips from other students are excellent. I wish I had some when I was going through all of this college stuff.

Share the site with high school and college students you know!

Google announced yesterday that there is a new look coming to the Google bar (that black bar at the top of the page when you are logged into Google products. The black bar is gone.

The new design will place the links to the Google services in a drop down menu under the Google logo. A list will be displayed of some services and then you can click "more" to see the rest. The menu links to Google+, Web Search, Image Search, Google Maps, YouTube, Google News, Gmail, Google Docs, and adds some new ones: Google Wallet, Google Offers, Google Music, Google Mobile and Blogger.


In addition, Google+ notifications, your profile menu and the +share box will be displayed to the right of the search box. 



I like it. It's much cleaner and easier to use and there are more services on the menu. The black bar was a bit distracting.


The new design will be rolling out to users over the next few days.

Google Maps 6.0 for Android just got released and it has a couple of very cool features.

One of the coolest new features is Indoor Google Maps. Airports, malls, stores, and other public places have map directories in Google Maps. Couple this with GPS and you won't get lost trying to find the terminal for your flight or your favorite store at the mall.

The floor plans will automatically appear when you are in the map and zoom in on a building where there is indoor map data available. It even adjusts for what floor you are on.





Mall of America in Minneapolis before and after, with a floor selector



San Francisco International Airport before and after, with 3D tilt


The other two features announced are easier switching between features using a drop down menu on the top toolbar and a new Places home screen to help you find new nearby places.

Read more about this (including some videos) on the Google Mobile Blog.

Related:

Android Apps related to Bloom's Taxonomy

Android resources - information, news, resources, and more

Android Smartphone and Apps I use as an educator

I just posted a nice infographic on better searches on Google, but Google has some great resources on better searches too.

Google's Educator Resource page has 8 free, downloadable posters, for educators that have tips and idea for doing better searches, including web search, book search, scholar, quiz, Earth, and for kids.

These are great resources to share with your students.

Google for Educators Resources.

This is a great infographic that has been making the rounds on the internet. It shows some great tips on doing better (ie. more targeted) searches on Google. Share it with your students.




Created by: HackCollege

Google recently launched Google+ Pages, which allows groups, companies and organizations to create pages on Google+ (similar to Facebook). Google+ Pages offers some nice features that are especially nice for education.

Google+ is Google's social network. Features include "Circles" where you put people and groups you follow. The circles allow you to selectively view certain posts and also share your posts with certain Circles only. For instance, you could have different Circles for each of your classes and selectively post information based on which class you want to receive it. You could also have a personal or friends circle and the things you post there would not be visible to your students.

I use Facebook for connecting with friends, since that's where most of them are right now. I have been using Twitter to connect with other educators, but now as more and more of my PLN are getting on Google+, I'm connecting with them there too. With Google+, you aren't limited to 140 characters, can post pictures and videos right with your comment, and comments are all kept with the original post.

Google+ Pages are a great way for groups, companies and organizations to communicate, share, and interact with their members and the public. People follow different pages to get the updates from those pages in their stream.

Some features I like about Google+ Pages over Facebook:

• ability to sort the pages you follow by category (circle) makes it easier to view just what you want to.
• no annoying ads or games like on Facebook. 
• Hangouts - video conferencing and chat
• easy to create and manage
• Not blocked in most schools like Facebook
• less distractions than Facebook

Google+ Pages are a great resource for teachers, clubs, schools, and districts to use to communicate and interact with their community.

I created a Google+ Page for Educational Technology Guy. You can add my personal Google+ account and  the Page to your circles.

If you are not on Google+ yet, I recommend it as a great way to connect and share with others.


Related:

Difference between Google+ Pages and Google+ Profiles