A Teacher Toolbox

Often teachers will ask for one program or website that will do it all! Wouldn't this be nice - to have one place to go and it does everything?!? Unfortunately, I have never found a single site that will do this - even though there are plenty out there that claim that they do. One of the reasons our district turned to Google Apps for Education is that it has a plethora of apps (note the plural!) to do different functions. It is a toolbox for teachers. As a woodworker, I have a toolbox that has various tools in it. Depending on the project, or even a step in the project, I will need to decide which tool is the best one for that task. Likewise, as a teacher, I have numerous "tools" in my toolbox to use in various situations in the classroom. When working in Google Apps for Education, we also have numerous tools to use, such as Classroom, Drive, Sites, Calendar, Blogger, Email, Hangouts, etc.

Here I will try to explain how you might use these various tools (this explanation is by no means exhaustive or the only way to use these tools):

• Email: this is a communication tool. Google uses their email system in order to inform you of anything happening in the other apps as well as allowing you to communicate in written form with others.
• Drive: a drive is a storage device inside the computer (you may have heard of hard drives, floppy disc drives, flash drives, or thumb drives). In Google, they named the place where you store files the Drive. This is all that Drive is: a place to store your files online. Any files in your Drive can be shared with others to be viewed or edited.
• Docs: a word processor, much like Microsoft Word or Apple's Pages.
• Sheets: a spreadsheet program, much like Microsoft Excel or Apple's Numbers.
• Slides: a multimedia presentation program , much like Microsoft PowerPoint or Apple's Keynote.
• Calendar: this is a calendar that can be private, shared with one or more people, or made public to the world. Multiple calendars can be created for different purposes, each one can be shared differently as well.
• Classroom: this is an assignment management system. Using Google Drive to handout or collect assignments can be cumbersome and prone to errors with students. Classroom makes it a LOT easier to handout assignments and collect them from the students, as well as monitoring their work as they are doing it. This is not a public site to use as your main webpage, parents will NOT have access to this as it is only available within our Google Apps for Education domain.
• Sites: this is a program that will create a website for you. This you can share with a class, a school site or with the entire world. This is to create an online presence to share with your student's parents. You can also use this to have students create an e-portfolio of their work for the year.
• Blogger: a blog is a web-log or internet journal. In Google Apps for Education you can specify who has access to read your blog, and you can invite others to collaborate on your blog as well. What you are reading right now is the EdTech Blog for Oak Grove School District.
• Hangouts: video and audio communication piece. This could be useful in a number of situations such as having someone in industry presenting to a class or connecting with a class in another part of the world.
• Youtube: this is an online resource for videos. With your Google account you can upload and share videos through Youtube, creating your own channel with videos for students, parents or the world to watch.

There are so many tools here that it may feel daunting to start using them. I would never suggest that you start by trying ALL of them. Rather, focus on using one or two of the tools and learning how to use those well, before moving on to another tool. You may even find that some tools can be used for multiple purposes (albeit not as effectively as a tool designed for that purpose - think of using a screwdriver as a paint scraper).