Movie Maker

The movie maker project is really exciting to me. I had no idea about this program and have fallen in love with it! There are so many things that I want to use this site for in regards to my personal life. I have also started thinking about using this for our classroom website for parents to see. I think it would be great to post a movie maker project of what the kids have been doing so the parents can see first hand what their children are working on. As for my classroom I am not able to have the children work on this project but I am allowed to create a project of my students working on a project and then be able to place it into a movie maker project for this class. I see this being great for students to learn and wish I had the opportunity to do so with my students.

Google Maps Earth/parent maps

Google maps is my favorite to use with my parents. It is very simple and easy to use!! Before I even started this section I had sent my parents google maps showing them how to get to the apple orchard from our building. We had planned a field trip to the apple orchard and I took the opportunity to send my parents an invite (if they could get away from work) to join us as well as a map showing them how to get there. I find that it is very easy and very reliable.
As for Google maps earth, I find this very interesting and fun to play around with for me. Unfortunately it is not something that I can use in my classroom. not being able to teach technology is something that I see as a downfall in our exceptional curriculum. We are very proud of our curriculum and the high standards we set for ourselves. But unfortunately the children do not have access to technology at all. There are no computers, projectors, ELMO's or other technology devices available for them. This program would be great to show the children where they live, where they used to live (many of my students are from another country) or to even show them how some places are different or the same as the area they live in. I can see this program being very useful in social studies and science projects for older students. Sadly I will not have the opportunity to see my students use this program.

Google Tools

While reading information on google tools I really realized how much google does and how much I use google with out even knowing it. I currently use gmail for my email. With that my phone is a google phone. All my emails, contacts and calendar go right through my email account. I can access all my contacts, their phone numbers and addresses (home and email) through my phone or my computer. I also have the ability to have my work calendar linked to my phone. I am able to look at my calendar on my phone and see which staff members are out for the day and who their subs are going to be. This makes it easy for me as a head teacher to plan for the week, month or my time off. Many of the sites, like blogger.com for example, automatically link up to my gmail account. I never realized until now that gmail or google is really a center for so many different tools and websites. Not only is it the center but it is also very secure. I trust google and gmail a lot more then most sites.

When looking at the educational google tools I was rather impressed at the fact that we can link with teachers around the world. The blogging sites help teachers talk to other teachers that are not in their school. I am a firm believer that reaching out to peers is beneficial in the teaching field. If we have an opportunity to reach out to teachers in other schools, districts, states and countries then we have even more knowledge to tap into so that we can make our classrooms better. So many of the classes I have taken have touched base on the fact that teachers need to partner together, google educational tools help to do that.