What is it?

Google is an American public corporation which earns revenue from advertising related to its Internet search, e-mail, online mapping, office productivity, social networking and video sharing services. Google’s mission is to organize the

world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.

Google has developed several applications known as Google Tools which are useful for a wide range of purposes

 

History

Google began in January 1996 as a search project by Larry Page who was soon joined by Sergey Brin, when they were both PhD students at Stanford University California. Their search engine was originally named “BackRub” because the system checked “backlinks”, which are incoming links to a website or webpage, to the estimate the importance of a site. At first, the search engine used the Stanford University website with the domain google.stanford.edu. The domain google.com was registered on 15 September 1997 and the company was incorporated as Google Inc. on 4 September 1998.

The name “Google” originated from a misspelling of the word “googol” which refers to 10100, the number represented by a 1 followed by one hundred zeros. Having found its way increasingly into everyday language, the verb “google” was added to the Merriam Webster Collegiate Dictionary and the Oxford English dictionary in 2006 meaning to use the Google search engine to obtain information on the Internet.

 

 

 

Types 

Google has created services and tools for the general public and business environment alike, including Web applications, advertising networks and solutions for businesses.

 

Advertising

-           Google analytics: Is a free service that generates detailed statistics about the visitors to a website. It is aimed at marketers.

http://analytics.google.com

 

-           Google AdWords: Is the main source of revenue. It offers pay-per-click advertising, and site-targeted advertising for both text and banner ads.

 

https://adwords.google.com

 

Software

 

-          Google search: Is the most used-search engine on the Web. Beyond the original word-search capability,Google Search provides more than 22 special features, such as: synonyms; weather forecasts; time zones; stock quotes; maps; earthquake data; movie show times; airports; home listings; sports scores, etc.  There are special features for numbers: prices; temperatures; money/unit conversions; calculations (3*4+sqrt(6)-pi/2 ); package tracking; patents; area codes; rudimentary language translation of displayed pages.

Google has also employed the Web Search technology into other search services, including Image Search, Google News, the price comparison site Google Product Search, the interactive Usenet archive Google Groups, Google Maps, and more.

 

www.google.com

 

-           Google desktop: Allows text searches of a user’s e-mails, computer files, music, photos, chats, Web pages viewed, and other “Google Gadgets”

 

http://desktop.google.com

 

-          Picasa: Picasa is a software application for organizing and editing digital photos originally created by Idealab and owned by Google since 2004."Picasa" is a blend of the name of Spanish painter Pablo Picasso, the phrase mi casa for "my house" and "pic" for pictures (personalized art).

 

            http://picasa.google.com

 

-          SketchUp: is a 3D modeling program designed for architects, civil engineers, filmmakers, game developers, and related professions.

 

 www.sketchup.com

 

-          Google Earth: Google Earth is a virtual globe, map and geographic information program.  It maps the Earth by the superimposition of images obtained from satellite imagery, aerial photography and GIS (geographic information system) 3D globe.    

 

http://earth.google.com

 

-          Google translate: Google Translate is software used to translate a section of text, or a webpage, into another language. The service limits the number of paragraphs, or range of technical terms, that will be translated. It is also possible to enter searches in a source language that are first translated to a destination language allowing you to browse and interpret results from the selected destination language in the source language.

Google Translate, like other automatic translation tools, has its limitations. While it can help the reader to understand the general content of a foreign language text, it does not always deliver accurate translations. Some languages produce better results than others.

 

http://translate.google.com

 

Education

 

 

Google is commonly associated with their popular web browser, but they have far more powerful tools that allow teachers and students to be able to

-          Create collaborative documents

-          Create collaborative PowerPoint presentation and web sites

-          Monitor online data.

-          Take notes while browsing the internet

-          Manage photos

-          Create collaborative maps

-          Monitor and participate in discussions

-          Publish videos

Get started with Google tools, by creating a Google account to take advantage of all that Google has to offer.                                                      

http://docs.google.com/Present?docid=dcf68xfb_40gf5j5r&invite=fwg7kqd

 

-          Gmail: Offers e-mail to your faculty, students and staff, search tools to help them find information fast, and instant messaging built right into the browser.

 

http://mail.google.com

 

-          Google Talk: Teachers and students can call or send instant messages to their contacts for free – anytime, anywhere in the world. People can collaborate on projects from different locations.

www.google.com/talk

 

-          Google Docs, Spreadsheets & Presentations: Create document, spreadsheets and presentations easily AND the collaboration features they have included allow multiple people to edit the same document at the same time.

http://docs.google.com

 

-          Google Calendar: Perfect for creating school or class calendars. It is easy to decide which calendars to view, which to publish, which to share, and they can be embedded and subscribed to as well.

http://calendar.google.com

 

-          Google Sites:  It creates websites with multimedia contents. It stores all your information in one place. It controls who can access and edit your information.

 

http://sites.google.com

 

-          Google Maps: It is more than a search engine that finds local businesses, shows maps and directions. It is also used to find content related to a certain place.

 

http://maps.google.com

 

-          Google Groups: It offers online debates or by e-mail. It is used to create personalized pages and to personalize your images and graphics.

 

http://groups.google.com

 

-          Google Reader:  Is a tool for gathering, reading, and sharing all the interesting blogs and websites you read on the web.

http://reader.google.com

 

Google Notebook: It is a Web-based wordprocessor, accessible from any Internet-connected computer, as long as the user is logged into their google account. Students can use google notebook to take notes as they are searching.

 

What can Google Notebook do for you?

-          Citation Aid: Automatically cites web links for later bibliography / works cited pages

-          Researcher's Dream: Ideal for harvesting images and collecting research project sources / quotations

-          Formatting Options: Permits rich text formatting and hyperlinking

-          Flexible Organization: Add section titles and create multiple notebooks

-          Drag and Drop: Move notes and section titles by dragging and dropping in your browser

-          Collaborative: Offers collaborative options with others: Let them privately view or jointly author with you (not publicly editable like a wiki can be)

-          Publishable: Can immediately post to the web, also printable

-          Searchable: If you have it in a Google notebook, you can locate it with a search query

-          Accessible: Web-based wordprocessor, accessible from any Internet-connected computer

http://notebook.google.com

-           Google Video: Is a free video sharing website and also a video search engine. Google Video allows select videos to be remotely embedded on other websites.

 

http://video.google.com

 

How can google tools be used with our students?

-          Google Calendar

Teachers, administrators and students can share school events and staff meetings. It is also a good idea to share schedules to keep students and parents informed about holidays, sport events, and student club activities. Having a common online toll to store and share all of our calendar information is so much more efficient than expecting everyone to keep track of a thousand events posted on hanging wall calendars.

 

-          Google docs:

Students appreciate the ability to collaborate online in their own time frame. Teachers as well as students appreciate the stronger accountability for individual effort on group projects. Google Docs enables teachers to observe the projects as they unfold, giving students feedback prior to the final outcome. Teachers are able to individually assess student participation and content using the revision tab on Google Docs to see how editing is proceeding and to encourage students as they work.

 

              And the students aren't the only ones using Docs to collaborate. Parents’ council meeting  

             agendas and meeting outcomes can be posted in Google Docs. Also department chair and staff

             meeting agendas can be moved from paper to Docs encouraging staff leadership, collaboration,

             feedback and 24/7 access.

 

-          Google groups:

Communicating with students outside of the classroom has always been a challenge. Google groups has made it easy to keep in touch with students - they can post messages, discuss class content and ask for help. And since it's an open forum, they can benefit from each others' questions and feedback.

 

-           Google Picasa

One of the best things about Picasa is how it locates all of the picture files on your computer, allowing the user to easily pull photos from multiple folders into one project. Using Picasa, students can create slideshows from scratch at the click of a button, create timelines and picture collages of famous people, and they can learn how to crop, edit and add effects to photos they have taken with the digital camera. Students can also create an instant web page with their photos, and with the Picasa upgrade students can create a web album of photos.

 

-          SketchUp

SketchUp is the most versatile, easy-to-use 3D software. It provides a lot of different software packages. SketchUp is by far superior to anything else in terms of ease of use. Now, instead of spending an entire semester designing a single project, students and teachers can use SketchUp to create several iterations based on the initial design – instead of building one house, students can build 10, each one morphing from the previous version.