This week’s Podcast for Teachers describes a great new service from Google designed specifically for educators. Google for Educators amalgamates all the Google services that are of use to teachers, including Google Docs & Spreadsheets, Blogger, Google Page Creator, Picassa, and Google Books.

Click here to listen to this most recent Podcast for Teachers.

None of these are new services. Google for Educators simply organizes the already available services from Google into one place for teachers.

Google has many valuable services for education, but their desire to keep the Google homepage (the familiar google.com page with the search box) clean necessitates burying these services several clicks beyond the homepage. These many varied and valuable services are therefore not easy for the tech novice to discover. Google for Educators changes that.

Of great value is Google’s new video tutorial series describing how to use many of the Google services. The true value of services such as Google Docs & Spreadsheets, Google Page Creator, and Google Books are not always obvious to the novice user. Many people do not realize that thousands of classic texts are now available as free downloads from Google Books, or that you ca use the free storage space included with Google Page Creator to upload MP3s and documents that you can make available for download with any other page (including a Blogger blog).

There are countless collaborative possibilities for educational settings with many of these Google services. Collaborative documents and spreadsheets with Google Docs & Spreadsheets and collaborative blogging (and the optional blog viewing restrictions included with the new Beta Blogger) open many interesting possibilities for the classroom.

Add some of Yahoo’s Web 2.0 services such as del.icio.us and Flickr and you’re got a great educational package for today’s classroom. I look forward to seeing how Google for Educators develops.

Technorati technorati tags: , , , , , ,

Bass News Right To Your Inbox!

Subscribe to get our weekly newsletter covering the double bass world.

Powered by ConvertKit