This week I had the opportunity to explore Google+ Communities. As a novice, I decided to begin by joining just two communities, Early Years Education and Google Apps Educators. Because I'm currently enrolled in an Early Childhood course, I thought the Early Years Education community could provide me with some supplemental material, and the Google Apps Educators community seemed like a very practical resource for my future as a teacher. The GAE community postings consisted of a lot of questions from teachers, which I think will be very helpful for troubleshooting when I have my own classroom. One teacher posted an interesting article from the website "Control Alt Achieve" that discussed ways to use Google Sheets for pixel art. Here's a fun example from the article: Although I'm not quite sure how I could use this as a time-effective, educational assignment, it does look like fun! I also discovered a new teacher blog called "Cult of Pedagogy: Teacher Nerds, Unite". The author actually wrote a book, taught at a university or a number of years, and is currently involved with teacher professional development. I look forward to exploring her page more in the future. The image to the right is the cover of the book she co-wrote, "Hacking Education". While Google+ communities can be useful for lesson planning and my own edification, I think it could be useful for students as well. They could search through different communities and collections for research purposes, finding information about recommended early childhood practices or healthy recipes to try. Teachers could even start a Google+ community of their own for the class period and have students post assignments on the class page. (I would have to look into privacy settings more for this, but it seems like a cool idea!) All in all, Google+ Communities seem like a great resource, and I hope to take advantage of them more in the future!
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