Tuesday, September 24, 2013

Learning Leaders Lunch N Learn: Google Plus and IFTTT

So excited to be working with our awesome team of administrators learning about and talking about best practices in educational technology!  Our first topic is Google Plus!
Google Plus for me is like meshing all your favorite social networking sites.  It's a Facebook, Twitter, Skype,  Google Groups and Picasa experience all in one package!
Why would Learning Leaders want to use it?
  • Sick of email?  Create a community for your building and communicate this way instead of flooding email inboxes.
  • Communicate different information with different groups of people
  • Schedule events
  • Participate in a Google Hangout- virtual meeting instead of traveling the 35 miles from one end of the district to the other- right Kris and Eric?
  • Professional Learning Network
  • Share photos
Google Plus Intro:  

  • Setup Profiles
  • Create Circles
  • Post
  • Communities
  • Hangouts


Creating a community:



IFTTT
If This Then That is a site that allows you automate technology tasks by creating recipes!  You may not even know you want certain tasks automated until you see you can!

Here are the recipes I have:

  • At 6 am every day, I receive a text message telling me the weather for the day.
  • I get a text alert everytime the pollen count goes above 1.0 (I know, weird, but I have a son with bad environmental allergies and this alerts me to be a Zyrtec day!)
  • I get a text message at the END of the Packer Game.  I found if I set it during the game, I would get a text before they actually scored as I was watching it on tv!
  • I get an email everytime someone posts an iphone5 for sale on Craigslist- my current iphone5 is cracked!
  • Every time I post to my blog, the content automatically is forward to a Twitter feed.

Future Topics:
I surveyed our team to see what topics they were most interested in learning more about.  The topics with the most votes will be our next Lunch N Learn Resources!  Here are the top selections:
  • Blogger- widgets, posting, layout, etc.
  • Best iPad apps for administrators
  • YouTube 101
  • Ideas for modeling the use of technology
  • Creating infographics- new way of sharing information
  • Using your smartphone in place of school issued phone




 

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