Google Summer Institute

HOW TEACHERS SPEND THEIR SUMMER VACATION

The kids are gone. The classrooms have been packed up and vacated. But teachers still have much on their busy agendas. There may be travel, home projects and family gatherings on the horizon, but this was a week for learning.

In Northern California, CTAP Region IV has been host to 50 teachers at two sites where overlapping Google Summer Institutes are scheduled all this week. The four trainers (Kathleen Ferenz, Cheryl Davis, Jerome Burg and Kyle Brumbaugh) are all rock stars with Google-certified credentials and decades of classroom teaching experience! They have pulled together a fabulous roadshow that puts teachers through all the paces of using Google Earth, Picassa, Docs & Spreadsheets, Blogs and Readers -- on their own and in collaboration with others.

On the other side of the Bay, teachers in Day Two of the training are opening blog accounts and posting to Google Groups. Here in Marin County, (where it is Day Three of the Institute), teachers learned how to gather and save photos from Calisphere to the desktop. They created a Picasa photo web album, turned it into a slide show and embedded it in their blog. Whew!

Here are some photos I took last September in Florence, Italy that I happened to have on my laptop in IPhoto. They were easily exported into Picasa so I could bring them into my blog as a slideshow. What fun!