Google Announces 100 Live Hangouts For Teachers Around The World

Google is celebrating World Teachers’ Day with a couple big announcements. In an effort to increase the connections between educators and learners around the world, they’ve assembled a whole slew of interesting Google+ Hangouts as well as a daily topic for each day of the week.

From learning how to flip your classroom to chatting with Sal Khan, there will be hangouts for an array of interests. Here’s the skinny from Google:

Can you apply Google's 20% time in the classroom?

I love learning and am a big advocate of creativity. So when I read about Google's concept of '20% Time' I knew I had to find a way of sneaking it into the ethos of my classroom.

In short, Google offers its engineers 20% of their timetable to work on their own projects – things that they are truly passionate about and not things necessarily in their job description. Fairly radical. And I couldn't help thinking, if it works for Google, could it work for education?

How Google Drive Makes It Easier To Teach Writing

Making my students switch from MS Word to Google Drive not only eliminated the headache of incompatible versions and big email attachments. It's made them better writers.

When I started teaching college writing and journalism classes five years ago, the choice was to have students submit assignments the way I had 15 years earlier -- as hard copy -- or as a Word document. 

Google apps dominate the higher education sector

 

After six years targeting the education sector, Google says it has more than 20 million students, faculty and staff around the world using Google Apps for Education.
The search engine giant made the announcement in a blog post overnight, adding it had 72 of the top US universities using Apps for Education, and more than 400 universities posting lectures or courses online using YouTube Edu.