iPads, MakerEd and More in Education

Google Tasks has been around for nearly ten years. While digital to-do lists are great for keeping yourself organized, Google’s attempt always felt like a half-effort. With no official mobile app, you had to turn to a third-party app to access your tasks from your smartphone or tablet, or you had to pull up the mobile version of Gmail on your favorite browser—as if.

Finally, Google has seen the light and released a dedicated Tasks app for both Android and iOS. And, as we noted yesterday, Tasks now has its own dedicated section on the right-hand side of Gmail itself, which is much better implementation than the uglier Tasks window that looked more like a chat box in prior versions of Gmail—only really accessible from a buried menu in Gmail’s interface, too.

From programmable LEGO robots to mobile apps like Hopscotch, there’s no shortage of games and toys designed to get children interested in computer science. But when it comes to adults, the options to learn how to code start to look a lot less like fun and a lot more like classwork.

Over the past nine months, Google has been trying to change that through Grasshopper, a mobile game meant to teach adults the basic principles of coding. Although five thousand people have already graduated from Grasshopper’s JavaScript Fundamentals course while the app has been in testing, the search giant is revealing it and making it publicly available for the first time on Wednesday. The game is launching for iOS and Android out of Area 120, Google’s internal workshop for experimental projects.

Google really wants you to learn how to develop AI. It's offering the same course it gives to company engineers free to everyone now.

In a move that has upset web users, Google has made it a little more difficult to download photos by killing its "view image" feature.

Google is well know for certain tools and services - Search, Gmail, Calendar, Drive, Docs, Slides, Sheets, Maps, Chrome, and such. These are all powerful and useful tools that are transforming teaching and learning in schools around the world.

However, in addition to those tools, Google has also created a wide range of services, apps, extensions, features, and other tools that are not as well known. Even though these tools may not be as popular or as widely known, they are still very useful in school settings.

These are the "Hipster Google" tools.

Need a little inspiration and seeking to add a little fun to middle, high school, college, PD or independent technology learning as this school year opens?
Google just launched Applied Digital Skills, designed to help your students succeed online and prepare for their careers.  The program includes free lesson plans and digital skills videos designed for an evolving job market. You’ll want to share these with your computer science department, your technology clubs and integrate them into your own program. If yours is a Google using or Google Classroom school, this is going to be a perfect match.

Today's post is on the new Google Forms' guide we published a few months ago. The guide, which is based on instructions and insights from Docs Help center, walks teachers through the process of setting up, editing and sharing forms using the new Google Forms platform. More specifically, the visual covers the following how-tos:

"Hey dude, where's my car" — never again will you have to utter these words, courtesy of a new Google Maps feature that lets you save your parking location on a map. 

Originally launched as part of a Google Maps beta (and only on Android) in March 2017, the feature just went live on Android and iOS. 

Google’s Nik Collection, a photo editing software package designed for professional photographers, once retailed for $149. Today it’s absolutely free to download, for both Windows and Mac users.

Here you can read Google’s announcement, which includes more information on the software package and its capabilities.

Today we’re making the Nik Collection available to everyone, for free.

Photo enthusiasts all over the world use the Nik Collection to get the best out of their images every day. As we continue to focus our long-term investments in building incredible photo editing tools for mobile, including Google Photos and Snapseed, we’ve decided to make the Nik Collection desktop suite available for free, so that now anyone can use it.

Those itching to get to grips with neural networks are in luck: Google offshoot AIY Projects has recently revamped its Voice and Vision Kits. These project-in-a-pack kits give you all you need to build an intelligent speaker or camera.

Exploring Computational Thinking (ECT) is a curated collection of lesson plans, videos, and other resources on computational thinking (CT). This site was created to provide a better understanding of CT for educators and administrators, and to support those who want to integrate CT into their own classroom content, teaching practice, and learning.

Ask anyone what Google is and the most likely answer will be that it’s a search engine, which is pretty hard to argue with. The tech giant’s most important platform is called Google Search, where people type in queries and get search results in return.

Pretty conclusive stuff.

Except the nature of search is drastically changing, as Google further integrates machine learning and artificial intelligence into everything it does. We now get personalised search results based on our location, user history and content preferences. We get content recommendations popping up on our phones and alerts for the latest news, sports results and travel updates.

The further Google develops its technology, the less we find ourselves searching. Instead, Google is becoming more of a recommendation engine than a search platform – and marketers need to start optimising for this now.

Digital citizenship has stepped into the forefront of a modern-day education. Experts indicate that as schools roll out tech, they also need to be rolling out digital citizenship education.

Tech giant Google heeded that call and partnered with experts to launch Be Internet Awesome, an interactive campaign that educates students on how best to act on the internet.

One part of this Google campaign is Interland, a game that has students travel an imaginary world where they need to fight hackers, phishers, oversharers and bullies with digital citizenship skills. While game-based learning can be effective, educators also need to be armed with skills to teach their students to be citizens of the web.

This month, Google extended its Be Internet Awesome program to include a free online training course to help educators establish foundational skills needed to teach their students to have a safe and positive experience online.

What Auto-Tune does for singers, Google’s AutoDraw AI experiment now does for those of us with limited visual talent. I’ve just discovered this handy tool and considering its power in demonstrating AI, as well as its affordances for so many everyday tasks.

Google Scholar is one of the top academic search engines out there. It provides research community with a host of useful features that facilitate their work and enhance their productivity. We have extensively covered Google Scholar in our previous posts and we have an entire section dedicated to everything teachers and student researchers need to know to tap into the educational potential of this platform. In today’s post, we are sharing with you an infographic we created a few months ago that turned into one of the most popular posts of 2016. The visual features 6 important tips to smartly use Google Scholar. These are:

Be Internet Awesome is a multifaceted program that includes a fun and free web-based game called Interland and an educational curriculum to teach kids how to be safe and responsible explorers of the online world.

Google has just released a brand new version of Google Earth for both Chrome and Android.  This new version has come with a bunch of interesting features you can use for educational purposes with your students in class.  Here is a quick overview of each of these features:

AutoDraw is a new A.I. Experiment, built by Google Creative Lab, which uses machine learning and artists’ drawings, to help everyone create anything visual, fast.