Thing #7 - Cool Google Tools

I have used Google Earth and Picasa in the past and will continue to use them in the future. Google Earth is a great tool to use in my library lesson plans as my class can literally fly to any place on earth for a skyeye view of a place we may be discussing in class. I found my elementary age students to particularly enjoy seeing places that they are familiar with, such as our school campus, their home, their Little League baseball field, etc... I have also used Google Earth in discussion about famous landmarks. One of my 2nd grade classes did a project on famous landmarks this year for their classroom teacher, and I was able to show the teacher and students how to view their various landmarks from space, using Google Earth.

I liked the Google calendar and thought it would be fun to set it up on my library computer and have student birthdays posted on the calendar. This would be a wonderful tool to assist me in implementing a Library Birthday Club next year. For more about Library Birthday clubs visit
http://www.saa-sds.org/SummerPacket/PDF/LibraryBirthdayClub.pdf


I have only used Picasa for my own personal use, but I do see applications for using it in a classroom setting. I particularly like the way you can edit the photos so easily and build a library for each of your albums. As I had stated in a previous blog, I enjoy showing students pictures of places I have visited. I could set up my Picasa albums on the student computers for them to view when visiting the library.

Unfortunately for me, I recently lost all my photos that were saved in Picasa when my computer crashed and I had to restore it back to its original settings. Thank goodness I had made print copies of all the pictures. So I learned a valuable lesson. I guess I was thinking that even if my computer crashed, that the pictures would be saved by Picasa. Next time I will be sure to back them up to my jump drive.