Creating, revising, testing content: learning by Google apps round tripping

Ingredients:

• Mobile phones
• Vocabulary for GDocs app
• Google Goggles
• Picasa
• Picasa mobile app
• Google Forms
• Google Spreadsheets
• Blogger
• Google Maps (optional)
• Google Sites (optional)

Most e-teachers associate one educational with one educational activity. However, most of Web 2.0 is “mashable” and particularly Google apps have a high potential to be re-used in Moodle, on blogs mobile apps and so on. In this post I would like to suggest an idea for a class project that includes creating, revising and testing content, which you consider a “learning cycle” from a constructivist point of view.

New Google Docs look and new features that are useful for students and teachers

Google Docs has a new look, which you can enable by clicking on the “try the new look” link above the menu bar (it is always possible to revert to the old look in the help menu). Google has adopted the new look across the board, i.e. with all major Google apps including:

• Gmail
• Google Calendar
• Google Docs
• Google Sites
• Blogger

Apart from the new look, Google Docs also has some new features which are useful for students and teachers.  The two most useful for teachers and students are probably support for compressed file types (.zip and .rar), offline viewing of documents and new functions for the web clipboard.

Using audio in Google applications

Google has great photo and video sharing services, however when it comes to audio there is a lot missing. A service like Audioboo or Soundcloud would be really great. Or simply the integration of audio in YouTube – in fact there are a lot of people who convert mp3 to video and upload it to YouTube. Actually, that would be one way of embedding audio into webpages that could be played by iOS devices as the YouTube player is HTML5 enabled.

Anyway, there is a flash-based Google audio player which interestingly is available at only some Google services. The Google audio player shows up in:

• Gmail – listen to audio files directly from your inbox
• Reader – enables reader to use podcasts RSS feeds in addition to text-based feeds.

How to create a mobile city guide as class project

Ingredients

• Google Sites
• Picasa
• Google Maps

One great class project could be to create a mobile tourist guide of their city or town (geography or foreign language class, or in combination). Google sites now lets you create mobile friendly websites. All you need to do is use a mobile friendly template when creating a new site. The students are grouped into teams.

The single teams then make web pages of the sights and other places of their town.  They post their own photographs to a Picasa album. Google Sites has an option to insert photos directly from Picasa. Of course, the mobile guide also needs a map of the places. The photos can be put on a Google map (see Creating a field trip photo & map mashup) and the map can be inserted directly from Sites without using the embed code.