Google Summit

We spent two phenomenal days attending a google summit during the school holidays. The pace that technology is advancing at is exciting and the fact that we have one to one devices in our school makes the information shared at the Summit invaluable moving forward.

I was overwhelmed with the wealth of knowledge acquired or possibly the exposure of knowledge, as I know that there are many aspects of what I have learned that I will be needing to revisit. Our staff created a wonderful resource folder that has slideshows of information that is a wonderful resource for ongoing use and reflection.

One aspect that has helped me personally was the extensions and apps to support classroom simplicity presented by Simon Ashby. It was great to revisit this focus at a staff techie brekkie meeting, as at the summit we were given a wealth of information within a small window of time.

One I am happy to be using is called Crafty Rights, this extension forces all Google Image searches to be for images free of copyright restrictions. This is reassuring for us as educators needing to respect laws of copyright and appropriate use of information on the web.

The Great suspender is another I have enjoyed using. This extension automatically suspends unused tabs to free up system resources, allowing increased battery life.

I have also added ABP- Add blocker plus. Adblock Plus is the most popular ad blocker ever, and also supports websites by not blocking unobtrusive ads by default (configurable).

Send from gmail seemed like a good idea, however I am still yet to use this. Send from gmail makes Gmail your default email application and provides a button to compose a Gmail message to quickly share a link via email.

Screencastify is another extension of google chrome allowing you to record activity on screen and create tutorials. I am yet to use this extension however my colleagues have and students have reacted positively to this. I see great benefit in allowing students to revisit an aspect of learning in their own time or if they were absent having the means to see something they may have missed!