NASA Comes to Normal

What do an Oceanographer, Business Manager, and Education Specialist have in common?  They all work for the Jet Propulsion Laboratories (JPL) at NASA and recently participated in a video conference session with a class of fifth graders at Sugar Creek Elementary!  The NASA professionals shared their experiences on the Mars rover program and fielded questions filled with excitement from eleven year olds for almost a full hour.  The experience was a demonstration of the immense educational potential when solid pedagogy and technology combine forces!

Google Keep Notes; Now in Google Docs!

Google Keep has always been a wonderful tool for keeping notes about anything that is important to you.  You can organize them quickly, add images, drawings, and even checklists.  But now Google has kicked up the productivity of Google Keep by allowing you to access your notes directly from within a Google Doc!  Another great feature is that you can now take notes from directly inside of your Docs and have them tagged automatically in such a way as they always appear front and center when you open that Doc again!

Check out the video below for a walkthrough of the process and some instructional ideas for using Google Keep together with Google Docs!  You can also read the full announcement from Google here.

Google Lit Trips and Tour Builder

Tour Builder is all about telling a story.  With this resource you can build a clickable, interactive story that guides students to different places around the world.  Watch how Bobby Lake, a high school history teacher, talk about the stories he creates for his students using Tour Builder.

make sure to read the whole post for more!