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Google's nGram viewer lets you search over 5 million books for the instances of words. Imagine it as a search engine into the uses of words since 1800. To better understand it, view the Tedx Boston talk " A Picture is Worth 500 Billion Words " by Erez Lieberman Aiden and Jean-Baptiste Michel. It is quite interesting and still a big imperfect as the uses of words change so dramatically. You can see that in this search (shown in the chart below) I did for the words school, teacher, and principal. Do we now call principals administrators instead? If we do, then administrator is used in many professions and the results won't just show schools. Comparing Teacher, Principal, and School and the use of these words in books. I also find it fascinating in the chart belowwhere I searched for educational technology, project based learning, differentiated instruction, classroom management, class size. Here we can see that as we talked about class size in ...

Google Docs is increasingly becoming a powerful file management tool with many new ways of uploading. It is very important as you upload more files to use tags and folders (color coding is great) to keep things organized. Folder Upload lets you upload whole folders to Google Docs. Optical Character Recognition option for images. This means that the text in your images will become searchable but also editable. So, that old letter your school uses from 10 years a go doesn't have to be retyped. Tip: Always check OCR converted docs. Sometimes text doesn't convert properly. Drag and Drop Upload using Chrome, Safari, and Firefox on the PC or Mac. What Happens if I run out of Space? Of course, Google is selling additional space for $.25 a GB should you run out of your 1GB of free storage that comes with Google Docs. This still isn't as easy as dropbox but for most purposes for my students it is helpful. If you use Google Docs or support it, you must follow the Goog...

OK, Julie and I have a monstrous deadline tomorrow and I've just given you a sneak peak.  Well, not intentionally. But as we were working on an important document for this, I went in and the document "hiccupped" for a moment. Julie Lindsay , in China at well after midnight said, "Wow, I just got the strangest error as I went into the doc." Then, as we started using comments and editing, we realized that we had just seen an upgrade happen to Google Docs AT THAT MOMENT. (At least to our accounts - sometimes this sort of thing is distributed so you may not have it yet.) I don't have time for everything but here are a few things I noticed in the last fifteen minutes: 7 Things Under the Hood of the New Google Doc Upgrade Improved Commenting : Boxes, Replies, Archiving, Deleting When you comment it is now shown in a balloon on the right hand side of the document in your particular color. If you click the return arrow, it inserts a response in the sa...

If you watch this, you'll see students who are expressing themselves in meaningful ways about the future of education and technology.  They fielded tough questions from the ustream as well after the 20 minute protest. Yes, the lively room got a little slow and it wasn't perfect.  This was our first public room and when we went public, someone went in and deleted all of the work because the creator had forgotten to lock the room.  But they proceeded to put it back together.  They've learned a lot. This is the video recording of the protest (you'll need to forward about 5 minutes to when the protest begins.)  AT the end the students speak out and share their message about the benefits of Google Lively and virtual worlds and fielded some great questions from the ustream. The protest audio file is available here. 

Stephen Downes said something that intrigued me about Google Docs being able to have only 10 simultaneous editors and linked to Tom Barrett's Great presentation on Google Docs. Honestly, we've used Google Docs since day 1 in my classroom, and although my class sizes are much higher than this, I'd never noticed a limitation. Maybe this is because I never have a team of more than 10 people. So, I looked up the limitations for Google Docs myself, just to confirm. Documents: "10 people can edit a document at the same time. Once this simultaneous collaborator user limit has been reached, additional users will be able to view, not edit the document. However, you can share a document with 200 people (whether you add collaborators or viewers, the total cannot exceed 200 people)." Spreadsheets "A total of 50 people can edit a spreadsheet simultaneously. You can share a spreadsheet with 200 collaborators and/or viewers. " Presentations "10 pe...

From John Battelle over at Search Blog. John says: Tonight I helped my daughter with homework. No big deal, right? But tonight the assignment came from her fifth grade teacher: Define these related words: Ballot Campaign Civil Rights Democracy Incumbent Issues Nominee Poll Platform Register Now, the teacher said there were two ways my daughter could find out the definitions. One was to use a dictionary. And the second was to "talk to your parents about it." John goes on to talk about how HE had to teach his daughter the define function in Google. For those of you that don't know about this handy function, just go to your search browser and type define: the word you want Here is an example:  define: incumbent It is the fastest way to define a word.  My first grader who can barely read can do it, but of course I taught him. Search literacy includes Searching via Cell Phone I would also add one more to this search literacy and that is how...

a simulpost with Tech Learning There are definitely people who are not using Google Adsense correctly and I believe it is impacting children. Imagine my suprise about 2 weeks a go when I went to Peggy Sheehy 's Suffern Middle School blog at 1 am to find ads all over the page for Hot Tech Chicks and NO content until scrolling WAY down - ads were everywhere. After sending it to Peggy and Kevin Jarrett , they had been hacked but it looks like the ads may have been just late at night - not really sure.   Since then, edublogs has done quite a few upgrades, but I'm not sure they notified people that a breach had occurred. Hint:   If they tell you to update your password, they mean it! Then, I go into my email today and a Audrey Hill , who is corresponding with Julie and I about her vision for a middle school flat classroom project write that "I'm flying by the seat of my pants"  so, what ad did I get, "Erect Hard!" Seems that "seat of the ...

Google Teacher Academy is a very worthwhile experience.  While not everyone can work it out to go to Chicago on September 24th, it is worth going through it just to be a part of the teacher resources made available after you go through the course. The networking is phenomenal. So, you've got the weekend, what is your excuse. Get out the webcam and try.  I can't hurt but it is a great opportunity.  So, send in your application .  I'll tell you, of all of the things on my wall, I get asked about the Google Certified Teacher MORE than any thing else.  It seems to be the thing that impresses the parents, for some reason. For those who think this is only Google-ganda -- actually we are allowed to talk about all kinds of tools at this event.  Good luck and Good Googling! Google GCT Google Teacher Academy teaching education

Wow!  On Google's blog this week, they write a post to students entitled  "Our Googley advice to Students: Major in Learning" (hat tip to Dan Pink ) in which they say: "At the highest level, we are looking for non-routine problem-solving skills. We expect applicants to be able to solve routine problems as a matter of course. After all, that's what most education is concerned with. But the non-routine problems offer the opportunity to create competitive advantage, and solving those problems requires creative thought and tenacity."  I like the creative thought and tenacity part.  So very often I push my students to solve a problem and WILL NOT tell them the answer.  I give them the next step, but what am I honestly teaching them if I go and fix it for them.   Just yesterday, I had a student who was creating a video in Animoto for her summer project (no I didn't assign that level of assignment, she took it up to that level because she "wanted to...