English: The Google search homepage, viewed in Google Chrome. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
Google I/O, the company’s sixth annual developer conference, got officially underway in San Francisco on Wednesday, and it was an eventful day. It took the company every minute of its epic three-hour keynote to unfurl a laundry list of announcements and updates, seemingly across every product category in its arsenal — from Android, Chrome and Search to Maps, Google+ and Hangouts — each with a fresh coat of paint. We even saw the arrival of Google’s very own subscription music service, today, which is already being touted as a potential Spotify killer.
Amidst Larry Page’s triumphant return to the stage (after addressing his much-discussed vocal issues yesterday), Google’s soaring stock price and sexy smartphone demos, it was easy to miss an important announcement concerning Google’s foray into a considerably less sexy market: Education. (And K-12 education, no less.)
Android Engineering Director Chris Yerga took the stage to introduce Google Play for Education, through which Google hopes to extend Play — its application and content marketplace for Android — into the classroom. The new store, which is scheduled to launch this fall, aims to simplify the content discovery process for schools, giving teachers and students access to the same tools that are now native to the Google Play experience.
This excellent resource from Mark Anderson is a good jumping off point if you are just starting to use Google Chromebooks. And if you haven’t you absolutely should consider them as a potential learning tool.
A while ago I created an infographic featuring 30 apps for the paperless iPad classroom. Today I’ve created a similar type of infographic but with essential Chromebook tools and apps for the classroom.
It features 18 different tools that I have used with children in my classrooms over the years that have had an impact on different areas related to learning: creativity, engagement, learning and progress.
Within the 18 different tools and apps there are lots of different types of activities you can complete using them. From managing your classroom to assessment for learning, to surveying children to creating presentations to positive engagement involving the children in your classroom and their parents and much more. There’s a lot here to unpick.If you’d like to know learn more about the tools and apps below or are interested in how you can work with me, or want to learn more about how you can utilise Google Apps for Education, Android tablets or Chromebooks in your school to assist with learning, please get in touch.
I hope you find the tools below as useful as I have.
