And We're Off! Oh, and More Chrome Fun!

Tomorrow begins the marathon of Google training with having 20 teachers in the morning and another 20 in the afternoon. We repeat the process all day Tuesday all day. By Tuesday our entire Second Early Adopter group will be using South Milwaukee Apps and we will be well on our way to having students groups in and testing the sites. To say the excitement is ramping up would be an understatement! I will post later this week with an update on the training dates. After these trainings, we will all have a chance to catch up a bit before we begin final roll out to staff in summer.

And now to Chrome....

I listed my top three extensions of this week in my previous post. Today I list my top three Apps--remember, this can change at any time since there are so many awesome things out there!!

1. Speech Recognizer

I can't wait to use this with kids! As a former Assistive Technology team member, I remember the days of spending hour after hour trying to evaluate new speech to text programs--and might I also add spending dollar after dollar as those programs were very expensive. This is a FREE speech to text app! Think a browser version of Dragon Dictate. Wow...

2. Weather Window

So, this is not a super flashy App nor is it super techy. This app gives an outside view of the current weather-as if you are looking out a window. Why would you want that? Well, in the elementary level we try very hard to help kids understand that weather where we live can be different from weather in other places around the world. This app takes looking at local weather around the world another step and actually shows them the weather. It's a great discussion starter. We currently have South Milwaukee, San Francisco and Anchorage, Alaska loaded to look at.

3. Earth for Chrome

Yep, it's Google Earth inside the Chrome browser. We found this while we were trying to decide if we could get away with Chromebooks at the elementary level. It lacks the bells and whistles of the Google Earth program, but it is a great start!

Next time we will look at some Gmail Labs that can come in very handy. Stay tuned...