Google+ Communities in the Classroom
Recently through my exploration of educational resources I came across my first Google+ group of particular note. The one that first caught my attention was G Suite for Education which I find is a great resource for utilization of google applications in the classroom. One post that caught my eye was a picture about improving your google search ninja skills to find exactly what you are looking for. This cheat sheet (right) details many useful tips and tricks for making better use of the google search function. This could be an valuable resource to give to students just starting research for a project or paper to be used in any classroom.
Another community I joined wanting to learn more about the application itself was Google Classroom. This community astounded me with the support its members were showing each other. While there were some posts about videos on usage, webinars, and other educational resources the majority of the posts were people helping each other with problems. It was like a community of learning; they were teaching, helping, and growing in knowledge with each other. The final community I joined is called Educational Technology. I already found an article I pinned from this group because one of the recent post was about entrepreneurship so was relevant to my content area. With this group there were some off-topic and spam posts, but with over 300,000 members I would expect that to happen sometimes. The posts that were relevant were mostly links to educational articles, good study habits, and other resources. Personally I would rename this group something like "Online Educational Resources" because the name is a little misleading to someone on the outside looking in, but it was still a consolidated grouping of educational articles to read. I think that Google+ can be a great avenue to connecting with other educators and locating educational resources for use and implementation. There are many possible uses for this tool in the classroom. A class might set up a community where they can post what they are researching or helpful tips for studying for a difficult class. They could even use it to connect and ask what the homework was when they forgot to write it down, the list of possibilities goes on and on. While it might not be perfect, it is a good place to start when you're looking for something, because odds are someone else on there is looking for it too! |