Getting to Know Google

Google is an American multinational technology company specializing in Internet-related services and products that include online advertising technologies, search, cloud computing, software, and hardware.

Larry and Sergey (the founders) named the search engine they built “Google,” a play on the word “googol,” the mathematical term for a 1 followed by 100 zeros. Google Inc. was born in 1998, when Sun co-founder Andy Bechtolsheim wrote a check for $100,000 to that entity—which until then didn’t exist.

You can learn more about who they are on the Google, Inc. company page or through Wikipedia's entry on Google.

You’re probably already familiar with Google Search, but did you know that Google offers many other tools that are useful in the classroom?

Let’s take a look at the Google Apps for Education suite, starting with the tool purpose-built for schools -Google Classroom.

Google Classroom is a collaboration tool for teachers and students that helps organize and streamline the classroom experience. With just a few clicks, you can create a class, add your students, and create assignments or announcements. You'll be able to see who's completed an assignment, who's still working on it, and assign grades when it’s finished. You can also instantly offer feedback to students, and see their questions or comments on their assignments.

Google Drive is like an online hard drive where you can store all your files - stories, designs, drawings, recordings, videos - anything! As part of Google Apps for Education, Drive has unlimited storage, so you and your students don’t have to worry about full disks, deleting old files, or losing anything when a computer crashes. You can access your files from any device, and, best of all, you never have to save: Drive automatically saves every time you make an edit!

Google Apps for Education also includes a number of Google products that promote collaboration among students and with their teachers. Students can work together, in class or at home, to complete assignments and group projects. All of their work is auto-saved, and they can even edit without WiFi.

• Google Docs: documents come to life with smart editing and styling tools to help you easily format text and paragraphs. Choose from thousands of fonts, plus add links, images, drawings, and tables
• Google Sheets: spreadsheets for analyzing, visualizing, and charting data
• Google Forms: quick & easy surveys to gather information
• Google Slides: a presentation tool that makes it easy to tell stories
• Google Drawings: Graphics and flowchart creation with shapes, text, and images

Additionally, Google Apps for Education includes tools that can be used to save you time and increase student engagement. These apps include:

• Gmail: Email, contacts, tasks, and communications
• Google Calendar: Scheduling, calendars, and appointments
• Google Hangouts: Live video conferencing and messaging
• Google Sites: Webpage creation and publishing
• Google Groups: Group communication and web forums

Finally, Google has other tools outside of Google Apps for Education that can be used in the classroom, which you may be able to access with your same username and password. Remember that these are consumer products and are not covered by the Google Apps for Education Terms of Service. They include:

• Chrome: Internet browsing
• Google+: Online communities and social networking
• YouTube: Online video hosting and sharing
• Google Maps/Earth: Interactive maps and satellite imagery
• Blogger: Publishing blogs

It may seem hard to know where to start. That’s the purpose of this lesson – to let you know what is available so you can consider how you might use each tool in your class and how they can enrich the experience of your students. This is just meant as an introduction. We will go into many of these tools in depth during the weeks to come.

(information from Google Educator Training course, edited)