Google Innovation Academy

This time last year I was in Austin, TX for the Google Teacher Academy. I had applied for years and I FINALLY made it in! I knew it would be an incredible experience....and it was. Everyone who had a hand in organizing our academy did a fantastic job. Our lead learners were beyond amazing! For two wonderful days I got to learn with and from some of the most talented educators on the planet.

Many of us still stay in contact either in our Google+ community, Voxer group or Twitter. I think I can speak for our entire cohort when I say that some of the friendships that formed during our academy will most certainly last a lifetime.

I'm telling you all of this because applications open TODAY for the Google Certified Innovator. I am so excited that I cannot stand it and I can't even apply! (But I would LOVE to help with the selection process!)

If you visit the Google Training Center you can find out the details of what you need to do to apply. The best advice I can give you is to follow the directions to the letter and don't be afraid to share your passion and enthusiasm for teaching, learning, and sharing. If you applied in the past but weren't accepted I hope you apply again. I was rejected over and over, but I eventually made it in. Each time I didn't make it into an academy, I reflected on what I could have done differently or what areas I could focus on to improve. I knew that the competition was fierce, but I did not let that deter me.

Any moment now the details of the Innovation Academy will be announced. It will be a fantastic opportunity for 50 or so educators to spend a couple of days with truly amazing people while developing an innovation plan that is designed to change education. Will you be one of them?

Follow the hashtag #GoogleEI. I cannot wait to see the next cohort of Google Innovators!

Thank you N.C. :)

Stories in the Data

Last week when I was at the Google Teacher Academy in Ausin, Texas I had the pleasure of meeting Chris Aviles. He was a brilliant and energetic lead learner and his session on 21st Century Storytelling left my head spinning. The focus of this session was how we can look at data and tell a story with it. Chris introduced us to a tool called Ngram viewer. Ngram allows you to search for words in over 5 million books that date back 500 years. I don't know about you, but I think that is incredibly impressive!

David Warlick just wrote a post about how he is using Ngram to help him write a book about this history of educational technology. Imagine all of the possible ways that students could use this in a classroom! Instead of telling students how events and people are related, with some guidance, they can begin discovering these connections for themselves.

Ngram is not the only powerful tool that you can use to search data. Here are some other ones that Chris shared with us:

•  Google Trends- shows how often a particular search-term is entered relative to the total search-volume across various regions of the world, and in various languages. Click here to learn more about Trends.
• Google Scholar- Google defines Scholar as a "simple way to broadly search for scholarly literature. From one place, you can search across many disciplines and sources: articles, theses, books, abstracts and court opinions, from academic publishers, professional societies, online repositories, universities and other web sites. Google Scholar helps you find relevant work across the world of scholarly research."
• Google News Archive- Search current or archived news stories from the US and other countries. Users can also search by topic.
• YouTube Trends- Google describes YouTube trends as "a new destination for the latest trending videos and video trends on YouTube and a resource for daily insight into what’s happening in web video."
• Google Correlate- Google Correlate is a tool which enables you to find queries with a similar pattern to a target data series. The target can either be a real-world trend that you provide (e.g., a data set of event counts over time) or a query that you enter.

Possible applications for these tools: 

• Learning the Mathematics of History through Ngram Viewer
• How to Use Google Correlate
• Fun with Google's Ngram Viewer
• How to Use Google Scholar

Creativity through Photography

Earlier this week I attended the Google Teacher Academy in Austin, Texas where I had the privilege of learning with over 50 of the brightest minds in education. One of my favorite learning sessions was Mobileography which was led by Cory Pavicich and Nicole Dalesio. We learned about about design principles as well as how to use NFC (Near Field Communication) tags. This article explains how NFC's work and this one provides some interesting ways to use them.

I enjoyed this session because ever since I was really young I loved taking pictures. I remember getting my first 35mm camera when I was in elementary school. When I was in high school I took an entire year of photography and I learned how to develop my own pictures. I can still remember the chemical odor of the darkroom and my excitement as the images began to develop. While darkrooms are a thing of the past for most of us what has replaced it is better! Mobile devices allow us to take pictures of everything which is great, but it can also be overwhelming! I learned how to take better and more interesting pictures in this session.

Imagine how photographs can enhance what we do in the classroom! If we teach students to take great shots and then use those images to tell a story. Photos can be used in so many creative ways to help students express their learning. If that isn't enough here are even more nine more projects to try with your students. I encourage you to think of a way to incorporate photography into your classroom before Christmas. Even if you have just a couple of devices students can take turns taking pictures. Take them outside and have them explore our world! Then for fun take a series of pictures and use Auto Awesome to create a movie!

Here are more resources shared by Cory and Nicole:

• Free Online Resources to Spark Creativity 
• How to Take Pictures with Your Phone 
• Snapseed for Android
• Repix App for Android or iOS