Remarks from a former Google CEO

Some of you are already aware that I took some personal days this past week in order to attend my youngest daughter’s graduation ceremony from Va Tech.  The commencement speaker was Eric Schmidt,  who, for over ten years was the  CEO of Google.  YouTube has made it possible for me to replay those remarks and pass along an abridged version of his address as the subject of this post.  Please keep in mind that I am not copying from a formal printed document, rather I’m transcribing from a speech, therefore the punctuation and phrasing won’t be exactly as it would be had it been prepared for publication.

             …"You're connecting to each other in ways that it was not possible before.  You're using those connections to strengthen invisible ties that hold humanity together.   The connections are what make us human.  They're the things that make  us stronger, ...

If you're awake you're on line, ...you're connected, ...some of you are probably texting right now....Don't take that power for granted.  What you carry with you every day can change the world.  When I was in college, I spent the summers working at Burris Hall in the computer center and the computer center consisted of one computer called an IBM 371-58 and it had a megabit of memory and a  megahertz of processing power, and I was talking to someone the other day and they said "Oh it's a room with a computer,  and I said ‘No, no,  you don't understand, the computer was as big as the room’, ...  and it probably cost around a 10 million dollars.

 Now take a break  from snap chatting and just listen to these numbers, In your phone you probably got 64 or 128 gigabytes of computation for let's say $500 plus or minus,  unsubsidized  That's  20,000 times cheaper and  100,000 times faster, so it's  two trillion times more useful than the computer i used here forty years ago.

Mr. Schmidt pointed out that the commencement address he delivered in 1999 is not on line...

 …because YouTube wasn't invented. And I didn't have a smart phone because they weren't invented, Google was one year old…Amazon was still only a bookstore. Facebook had not been founded.   You couldn't use Twitter, …and, of course, Google Maps  didn't exist, .....So, when you think about it, that's a lot of change, ....[when I was in college] all of our information was what our teachers told us. … now you can know almost everything about everything, .....[just by using]  your smartphone.

If you change the way you approach things,  then you have an opportunity to change the way your life begins.  In other words you chose to live this way… So figure out a way to take advantage of these tools,…  You're the Internet generation, you grew up on line.   You’re the first generation to literally grow up with this as ubiquitous.  It's interesting that I hear lots of people bemoaning this generation, specifically that you all grew up living life [in front of] computer screens always connected to something or someone.  I'm absolutely convinced that these critics are wrong.  The fact that we are now all connected is a blessing.  It's a blessing for safety. It's a blessing for education.  It's a blessing for world peace.  It's a blessing for economic growth.   It's a blessing for your business futures…

 A world's worth of information is perpetually now at your fingertips.  This opens the door to all sorts of interesting questions: How are we going to process all of this data?  … How will you use it?  How will you use it for  good?  How will we find the right balance between letting the data lead us and following our inherent creative and brilliant human intuition….

It is interesting that in the digital age, analysis and interpretation  are even more important than factual knowledge,  ...So here's the deal, …Just because we know so much doesn't mean our problems go away.  The future, doesn't just happen.  …Technology doesn't work on its own.  It's just  a tool.   You're the ones who harness its power.  You're the ones who lead it.  It's in our service and in particular in your service.   It's up to you to know your environment and to use these new tools at your disposal in the smartest and most effective ways possible... A computer is obviously capable of identifying insights…but, the truth is there's plenty we can do and we need to do for ourselves. Intuition, compassion and creativity, these are the things that make us special, ...These are the things we do much better than machines and that define us as humans....

So we're on a cusp of a new and much larger scale of innovation. ...  [Progress will be made in areas such as climate change, fighting cancer, etc…]   But, someone has to make it happen and those people are you.  Computers won't just do this.  It's not going to happen on an auto pilot and it's not going to happen because computers think it's going to happen.  You need to drive it.   You need to make it happen.  ...All  of us are counting on you.   The future that you're building is mine too, ...I need you to do some things; ...I need you to be curious...Ask a lot of questions and go out and try to find the answers.  Don't accept traditional or conventional wisdom.  …When someone says you're thinking too big, say, ‘I don't think I'm thinking big enough.’ 

I thought all of this is a good reminder that technology is a tool which we have to use if we are to connect with today’s digital generation.  Also, teaching this generation higher order thinking skills is far more important than the impartation of facts, after all, students can find all the facts in the world merely by taking their phones out of their pockets.  We need to help them develop the skills for using these facts.

Building a Google Earth Tour the Easier Way

In my last post I introduced Google Earth Tours and stated that in a future posting I would give you information on how to build a Google Earth Tour the "Easy Way"--as explained by Tim Stahmer.  I'm going to change that a bit.  I used "Maps Engine Lite" and a spread sheet to create a KML file, as Mr. Stahmer suggested and found that it was indeed pretty easy.  However, I then tried "Tour Builder with Google"  and found it to be easier yet.

Although it is the "beta" version and is labelled an "experiment," I found that Tour Builder worked very smoothly, was self explanatory and intuitive to the point where I really find it unnecessary to explain it in any great detail here.  I'll just give you a brief overview and link to a sample I made which pertains to the Geography SOL on the monuments of Latin America .

To build your own tour simply follow this link and sign in with your Google account.  Of course, if you don't have a Google account you'll have to create one (remember that next year you will have a Google account through ACPS).  After logging in, you might want to click on either "View a Tour" to see a sample--or perhaps you'd rather click on "gallery" and choose a sample to view from a list of Tours.

Eventually, you'll want to click on "create a tour" and start building your own.  After naming your tour and naming yourself as the author you are then sent to an introduction page.  There you'll want to describe what your tour will be about, perhaps you'll want to add a photo to this cover page.  These tasks are so easily accomplished that there is no need for me to describe them.

The next step is to add the locations you want on your tour.  You simply click  on "add location" and begin to type in a name...with all of the locations on my sample tour,  it automatically completed the location before I finished it.  I tried my location--"Modest Town, Virginia" and it handled that just fine.  In a window on the right I flew there in just seconds and viewed clear satellite images of all my neighbors' houses.  You can adjust this view using controls which appear when you run your mouse over the image.  When you get things adjusted to a view you like, you can lock that view in so that it is what the student sees as they take the tour--although they will be able to pause the tour and experiment with the controls.  For example, by moving the little statue type figure on to the image, they can see what the "ground level" view looks like for that location.  By going under "advanced options" and clicking on "show historical imagery" one can even add a slide bar allowing the viewer to see satellite images from earlier years (the earliest I found was 1931).  This could be really useful in a lot of ways.  For example for a science teacher who wants to teach about the changing shoreline.

It is easy to add up to 25 copyright free images (per location) from Wikipedia or other sources.  It is easy to add links to articles about the location.  It is easy to add videos --however, it is not so easy to add a video that actually works with our filters.

After you click on "done editing" a "share" button appears which gives you a web address which you pass on to those to whom you wish to grant access to your tour.  The address is long and complicated--so it would be best to either shorten it, or post a link to a site students can just click on (I'd be happy to work with you on that). A simple URL shortener is http://goo.gl/ - simply paste the long URL into the box on this site, click "Shorten URL" and a shortened URL is automatically created.  Portaportal is one good site for sharing bookmarks.

In summary, Google Tour Builder is user friendly and an extremely useful tool.  I would think a geography teacher would want to make tours taking the students to the sol listed monuments on each region of the world.  I;m not sure I can come up with any immediate applications for math teachers, but I can think of them for almost every other subject area.  I can also see engaging students by having them build their own tours.

Re-Charging Classroom Instruction with YouTube Edu and Google Apps

This session was presented by Kim Randall who makes her living doing these types of workshops around the world.  However, while sitting through the session, I thought she was a classroom teacher, because all that she suggested seemed very practical, do-able, and valuable.  Here I'll recap of some of the strategies she suggested and I'll provide you the list of resource links she accompanied them with.  Although you won't be able to use these strategies quite the way she anticipates (because our students won't have Google accounts until next year) with some modifications they could be used this year.

Strategy One- Vocabulary Development - this strategy could be used when teaching or introducing a wide variety of material.  Kim turned the session into a classroom and the session participants into engaged learners.  She first showed us a video on the City of London, a city of 11,000 people which is surrounded by London, a city of 7,000,000 people.  She paused the four minute video repeatedly to allow us to write down seven to ten key words or phrases.  Then she had us put ourselves into groups in which we agreed on a group list of 7-10 key words or phrases, which a group recorder typed these into a Google form.  From the form the terms went into a Google drive spread sheet from which she copied and pasted into Wordle to create a word cloud.

Strategies Two and Three - Using Google Draw Graphic Organizers - If you have a Google account, perhaps you are familiar with Google Drive.  For those of you who aren't familiar with Google Drive, let me give you a brief introduction, as NEXT YEAR you will have an ACPS Google account.  Google Drive is similar to DropBox in that it provides cloud (online) storage.  Additionally, there is an online word processor, presentation creator, spreadsheet, etc.  Each of these applications can be used collaboratively--two or more people can edit the document simultaneously.

Among these applications is "Google Draw"--which I had previously disregarded as not all that relevant to the high school classroom.  Well, I was wrong.  Kim Randall had us take what we had learned and collaboratively enter it into a couple of different graphic organizers.  I believe she made these herself, but there are a number of templates available for Venn diagrams and that sort of thing.
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Strategie Four - Three Facts and a Fib. Another activity session participants engaged in was to read through four statements and try to identify the fib.  These predictions were entered into a Google form so that the "class" could immediately see how many class members chose each of the four statements.  We then watched a YouTube EDU video on sea turtles to find out if we were correct.  This seems to be a very useful way of getting students to pay close attention to educational videos.  Of course there are many variations of this activity--for example having students watch a video and then create their own list of three facts and a fib.

Strategy Five - Half  the Story.  With this one, the teacher takes an image and simply crops out half of it. The students then speculate on what the missing part of the image shows.

Strategy Six - Caption It - Show the students an image and have them create a caption for it, thus encouraging them to study and analyze the image.  As a former social studies teacher I can see a lot of applications for this,.

Here is the list of resources Ms. Randall provided for use with these strategies--or some strategy of your own.

• www.youtube.com/education
• www.youtube.com/teachers
• www.youtube.com/schools
• http://www.google.com/edu/
• www.google.com/drive
• www.wordle.net
• www.google.com/images
• www.flickr.com      
• www.pics4learning.com

Posters with Quotes

I recently read an article about several websites that allow the user to create a poster with some sort of quote and thought teachers could make use of these sites in many ways.

1. Create posters for your classroom.  While many of the sites want you to purchase a printed poster from them, several allow you to download the poster and print it yourself. Perhaps a poster of your class rules?
2. Use a poster to peak your students’ interest in an upcoming topic.
3. Of the sites I tried none required any type of log in so students could:

a.      create a poster about the topic you are studying.

b.      use a quote from a book they are reading.

c.       create virtual postcards.

d.      write short poems and “posterize” them.

e.      summarize a book in poster format.

f.        create book covers or posters for a film or book.

The possibilities are endless. Each of the sites is different, but they all allow you to combine typography with pictures into an attractive piece of art.

1.       Recite (http://www.recitethis.com/) – go to the website, type in your quote and then choose from one of the many templates displayed with your quote. While your options are to order the quote printed on canvas, or share it on sites that are not allowed in ACPS (Facebook, Pinterest, Tumblr) you can use the snipping tool like I did to grab the image and print it yourself (for free).

2.      QuotesCover.com (http://quotescover.com/) – choose a quote from a database of famous quotes, ancient proverbs, greetings & messages, or invitation wordings, or create your own quote.  Next step is to choose your editor (Facebook cover, Google+ cover, eCards, Wallpaper Maker, and For Print). You can then rotate, scale/resize, move your quote, change the font and color scheme, and then upload a picture for the background. Download your finished product to print.

3.      Pinwords (http://www.pinwords.com/) – “instantly add beautiful text to your images”. If you don’t have an image you can choose from one the site offers. Choose from one of six styles, write your quote, choose the font style, choose the font color.  I used the snipping tool to grab the image.  You may email it if you choose.

Tagxedo

I found an interesting site, Tagxedo.com and it is very similar to Wordle—which most of you should be familiar with. The site provides a place for you to enter text and in a matter of seconds it turns this text into a “word cloud”—suitable for a poster or for use with an LCD projector. You can enter words by typing them in directly, by copying and pasting, by entering a web address, by entering a word in a search box and doing an online search, from Twitter (well, not while at school), or by uploading a text file (you cannot use a .doc or .docx file, it MUST be a .txt or .text file). Then you can choose the shape the words will be arranged in, the color theme, the font and even the orientation of the words. Click on submit and seconds later a visually appealing word cloud is created. With or without an account the site is easy to use and fairly intuitive. Users must remember to save a file they want to upload as a text file; it also could become more difficult if you wanted to create your own shape to paste the words on. However, even a technophobe ought to be able to handle this one. Here is an interesting observation about reviews on Tagxedo: Jason Tomaszewski at educationalworld.com agrees with all that I’ve said above, however, he adds:

Tagxedo only earns a 3-star rating due to limited applicability to the classroom. Sure, it’s pretty cool to see your words form a picture, but other than that, there really isn’t a lesson to be learned.

In stark contrast, Hardy Leung, writing in teachersfirst gives this massive list of ideas for applying Tagxedo to the classroom: Th

is is a terrific visual tool to share on an interactive whiteboard or projector. In primary grades. Enter a group of related words into the text box, such as sight words, words with the same spelling cluster, or vocabulary terms. Then have students roll over the words to read them aloud as they pop out (only works in the ONLINE version of the clouds). Paste in a passage or URL for a political speech to visualize the politician's "message." Analyze advertising propaganda by visualizing the language used in TV or print ads. Create word clouds of historical texts of inauguration speeches as time capsules of the issues of the day. Use this site as a way to help students see and memorize terms and important vocabulary, especially visual learners. Use it also when writing poetry or reading passages of great literature to "see" themes and motifs of repeated words and images. Have students paste in their own writing to spot repeated (and monotonous) language when teaching lessons on word choice. Students will be surprised to see what words appear to be dominant. ESL and ELL students will eagerly use this site since word order will no longer be a problem for them. Have students work in groups to create word posters of vocabulary words with related meanings, such as different ways to say "walk" or "said" and decorate your classroom with these visual reminders of the richness of language. Use themes and shapes that coordinate with the word cloud (for example, use a bird shape when creating a cloud about flight or a heart when interpreting a love poem. Consider using a word cloud as a first week of school activity where students discuss summer vacation or what they did over the summer. As a first day activity, students could also make a cloud with words about themselves, then have classmates guess which cloud matches which person.

So, which type of teacher are you, the one who offhandedly rejects Tagxedo as not applicable, or the one whose fruitful imagination sees endless possibilities? For myself, I see one very obvious way I’d use it in a classroom. At Tagxedo’s home page—which looks like this:

 

I simply typed “Al Kaline” in the search box. Al Kaline was one of the heroes of my boyhood—an all-star right fielder for the Detroit Tigers from 1953-1974. In a matter of seconds, Tagxedo produced the following:

What a great anticipatory set this would be. Now it might say “Detroit” rather than Baltimore, but I, for one, immediately remember that Baltimore was Detroit’s biggest rival during the Earl Weaver/Mayo Smith years (sorry, I realize that while reminiscing I’ve lost most of you). Getting back to my point, if students just researched the relation of each of the prominent words to Al Kaline, they would have a very good picture of the significance of Al Kaline—what a great way to introduce virtually any topic. Here is a similar example, this time by searching “Gettysburg Address” and then changing the shape and color scheme:

 

  So, my final word on the matter is that in its most basic form, Tagxedo is a very useful tool which is elegantly easy to use. Since no account is needed to create a Tagxedo it is easy for students to create one to put in a report or presentation.

Fun, Quick Technology Projects from BigHugeLabs

A teacher at NHS showed this to me, and it is worth passing along.  BigHugeLabs has a wealth of tools available that could be used to help teachers create fun technology projects with their kids.  How about having students create a magazine cover summarizing their last Science unit?  Or maybe they could make up "trading cards" for famous Virginians.  There are tools to create lolcats and motivator posters, as well as jigsaw puzzles and movie posters.  Here is a quick Trading Card that I made just for this blog post:

Of course, anything can be added at the bottom of the card. There are many tools available on the BigHugeLabs website.  Take a look, and do something inspiring with your students!

http://bighugelabs.com/