15 great Google posts this week #18

Search is Google’s main business and they take it seriously. Features are constantly released that enable it to better display the information that is most relevant to you so you (…) Read more

Tom Daccord and Avra Robinso explore five Chrome Apps and Extensions to help students make their thinking visible.One of the biggest benefits of using technology in the classroom is that it can help us reach all learners. The more we understand how students think, the more effective we can be as educators. Technology creates a wide range of opportunities for students to reveal what they are thinking — from recording and presentation tools to interactive note-taking applications.

Google Classroom allows you to assign work and collect it. What Google Classroom allows you to assign work and collect it. What Google Classroom does not have (thankfully) is a gradebook. This allows you to use Google Classroom with whatever gradebook system you have. Research shows that students value high-quality feedback over simply receiving a score or letter grade. Google Classroom makes it easy to quickly provide students feedback either directly on their document by inserting comments or by leaving a comment in the grading list.

More Google gold for you from MakeuseOf.com! Readers listed some of their favourite Chrome extensions in one of their recent polls and the editor turned them into a handy list. Today they bring you a few more essential extensions geared toward helping you work better online. 

Google Chrome is a Web browser used by millions of people around the world. It is, by some estimates, the most popular Web browser in the world, and it has many more lovers than it does haters. However, the standard Chrome experience can be made so much better with a handful of extensions. 

A 30 minute video looking at the Google Drawing app which can be using to create powerful graphical organisers that be shared within your classes. If you have ever been frustrated by the focus on text in Google apps rather than drawing this is the session for you!.

This is a post about the well-known Alice keeler. Alice Keeler is a mother of five children, a Google Certified Teacher, and the author of the book “50 Things You Can Do With Google Classroom.” Recently we sat down with the self-proclaimed “Queen of Spreadsheets” to learn more about how she relies on (and pushes the boundaries of) Google Docs both in the classroom and in her busy everyday life. 

Storing and Sharing is easy with any types of documents on the Google Drive. Access your documents anywhere with the power of the Google cloud.

Google Forms and how the Notification feature is set up and how it works. Presentation by Oli Trussell.

Signing in to Chrome brings your Chrome stuff to all your computers. See how it is done in this short video. 

Brad Currie says, "A good friend of mine, Billy Krakower, recently asked about my thoughts pertaining to a strategic Google Apps for Education rollout plan. Below you will find what I shared with him via email a few weeks ago."

Please feel free to use this resource with students or in teacher trainings. The new literacy is to teach students how to search. Rather than giving students answers, we ask really good questions. Students then use advanced search techniques to find the answers. Most important is then… what do they do with that information? Higher DOK levels would have the student formulating their own statements and supporting those statements with research rather than simply gathering facts.

Inbox by Gmail is now open to  to everyone. Inbox is a versatile app created by Gmail team to provide users  with an enhanced email experience. The app provides some cool functionalities to help you better manage and organize your inbox. Below are some of the main features included in Inbox app:

Google maintains blogs for all of their various products and services. It is a good idea to  subscribe to many of those blogs to stay up to date Recently Google introduced a new and better way to stay current on their latest new offerings. Google New is a central location where visitors will find news on the latest updates to Google's products and the newest product offerings from Google. Embedded in this post is a short video introduction to Google New.

Thanks to multiple on-going disputes between Google and Microsoft, along with the former’s desire to push their own Hangouts app, there has never been a way to natively install Skype on a Chromebook.

Previously, if you really wanted Skype on your machine, your only option was to install Linux as a second operating system on your machine, then use the Linux version of the software. All that has now changed. Chromebook owners, here’s how to install Skype on your device.