In this official google blog have announced that they are going to put more effort into helping teachers. They are created a page which gathers together all of their tools that they think are going to be useful to us. This includes the obvious such as Google Earth and basic search, but also some possibible less obvious ones like Docs & Spreedsheets and Calendar.
There is some information on how to use the tool and what it could be used for in a classroom. Alongside that there is also a comment from a teacher telling us how good it all is, and links to some other people’s lesson plans.
This is all well and good, I’m sure that many teachers use at least one google product during their day. I’m left wondering how many school in London behind the LGfL will not be able to do any of these things (and everyone should have seen thier school and local area on Google Earth) at all because as far as I am aware Google is still a filtered domain. We have taken managment of the firewall in-school to be able to access things such as Google searching for both our staff and pupils. After all I know of several people who consider not having access to Google as not having access to the internet!
