I’m delighted to have been chosen as a ‘Lead Learner’ for the first-ever UK Google Teacher Academy on 29-30 July 2010. I’ve been asked to run the sessions on Google Earth and am very aware that whilst I’m certainly an enthusiast with some advanced knowledge, I’m certainly not an ‘expert’.
Continue reading “#GTAUK: Google Earth wiki & ebook”
Remember the hype just before and during the launch of Google Wave on 30 September 2009? It was going to be revolutionary, change the way we work forever, and oh! to have an invite…
And then reality hit home. What can you actually do with it?
It was all a bit… meh. 🙁
Google certainly does love the ‘release early, release often’ mantra. That means, of course, that its offerings tend to get better as time goes on. And this is certainly true of Google Wave.
As you can see from the screenshot above, when you go to create a new wave you are given 6 templates from which to choose. Below is the ‘Task tracking’ option:
When you throw the extensions into the mix, you’ve got a very powerful collaborative tool. The iFrame gadget, in particular, is an extremely valuable option. I can imagine, for example, distributed teams using Google Wave for meetings. They’d use the meeting or brainstorm template, add the ‘Yes/No/Maybe’ gadget and the ‘Map’ gadget to organise a face-to-face meetup. There’s also several gadgets to turn Google Wave into the liveblogging app to end all liveblogging apps:
I’m going to be recommending Google Wave for meetings, project management and more over the next few weeks/months – both at work and for ‘extra-curricular’ activities. I’ll also be purchasing The Complete Guide to Google Wave by Gina Trapani’s, of Lifehacker fame. The book’s also freely available to read online – probably for a limited period only. 😀
Are YOU using Google Wave? What for?
This follows on a previous post r.e. the problem with (non-OSS) free stuff.
Image: ‘Bees‘
I’ll keep this short.
Lifehacker has a great regular thing called Hive Five for software/productivity recommendations. It goes like this:
We should totally do this for education. I’ve created a wiki at http://eduhivefive.wikispaces.com in anticipation. :-p
Perhaps, given the demise of Etherpad, we could kick off with: “What’s the best online tool for collaborative writing?” and use #eduhivefive and #writing as hashtags?
