Holiday Edition: Google for Teachers

I’m taking a few days off to relax and enjoy the holidays. Just as I did at this time last year, for the next three days I’ll be re-running the most popular posts of the year. I’ll be back on Monday morning with fresh content. Happy Holidays everyone!

Google offers some wonderful tools for teachers, but I’ve learned over the last couple of weeks that while teachers are aware of many of Google’s offerings like search, docs, and maps many teachers aren’t aware of how to use these tools or what these tools offer beyond the obvious. Therefore, I sat down yesterday and started putting together this guide to using Google search, docs, books, news, and maps in the classroom.

This guide avoids some of the obvious things, like using Google Docs for collaborative writing, and instead focuses on some of the lesser-used Google tools options like publishing an online quiz using Google Docs. In all there are 33 pages containing 21 ideas and how to instructions for creating Google Maps placemarks, directions creating and publishing a quiz with Google Docs forms, directions for embedding books into your blog, and visual aids for accessing other Google tools.

Update: In July 2010 I released a companion to this guide titled Google for Teachers II.