Doodle 4 Google Time

Google announced that the ‘Doodle 4 Google‘ contest began so be sure to register your school so your students can submit their doodles to Google. Below is the information from the Google site regarding the contest:

• …Figure out a cure for cancer
• …Build a movie theater on the moon
• …Be an underwater explorer

Welcome to Doodle 4 Google, a competition where we invite K-12 students to work their artistic will upon our homepage logo. At Google we believe in thinking big and dreaming big, so this year we’re inviting U.S. kids to exercise their creative imaginations around the theme, “If I Could Do Anything, I Would …”

We’re looking forward to the kids’ answers too. Gather those art supplies and some 8.5″ x 11″paper and encourage your students to enrich us all with their creative visions for what they would do in the world, if they could do anything.

This year, a group of “Expert Jurors“, well-known illustrators, cartoonists and animators from organizations like The Sesame Street Workshop, Dr. Seuss Enterprises, The Charles Shultz/Peanuts Museum and Pixar Animation Studios, will be helping us select the 40 finalist doodles as well as attending our awards ceremony to personally meet our winners.

Registration closes at 11:59:59 p.m. Pacific Time (PT) on March 17, 2010, and entries are due by March 31, 2010 no later than 11:59:59 P.M. Pacific Time (PT). The winning doodle will be featured on our Google.com homepage on May 27, 2010.

What a fantastic theme for the contest! I can’t wait to see the winning doobles as I love to explore the doodles students have made in the past. The doodles are so creative and elaborate! You can view the winning doodles from previous contests here: http://www.google.com/doodle4google/history.html. Spring break would be a good time for students to work on their doodles. Register today and good luck the winning doodlers!

Below is the ‘Doodle 4 Google’ event video from the 2009 student contest.

How are you planning to use Google Wave?

A few weeks ago I received the infamous invite to from Google to use Google wave. I excitedly activated my Google Wave account and began searching for Waves to join, read and participate. I sent out the eight invites that I was allocated and started to add contacts and read the Waves people had added me to. Google Waves takes some getting used to but once more people begin using Google Wave I think Skype may become obsolete for instant messaging.

more about “google wave”, posted with vodpod

One fantastic feature is the way Google Wave translates the messages in the Wave in real time. This video is a great demonstration of this feature. This would be an awesome to immerse students in conversation in different languages to collaborate with other students and classrooms around the world. This is definitely a way to ‘flatten classrooms’ and bring the world into the hands of your students.

more about “Google Wave”, posted with vodpod

I am fascinated by what I have seen in the various Waves I have been added so please continue to add me to the conversations (kcaise@googlewave.com)! I noticed that I received another 12 invites so if you would like to receive one of the 12 Google Wave invites post a comment about how you would like to use Google Wave with your students or staff. If I receive more than 12 requests, I will create a survey and people can vote on the best suggestions. So, how are you going to use Google Wave?

Spinscape isn’t so Free after All

NECCunplugged

I didn’t get to go to NECC this year due to finances so I have been attending (and moderating) NECCunplugged sessions virtually. Today at the WoW2 session Cheri Toledo shared that she had attended a session on Spinscape and was impressed with its features so I decided to check it out.

I hadn’t heard of Spinscape and was pleasantly surprised to find that Spinscape is a collaborative suite of online products. According to the website,

What is Spinscape™ ?

Spinscape™ is a tool users (people like you and me) can fire up to brainstorm, collaborate, annotate, and autodiscover new bits of digital information.

Research

Spinscape’s Autodiscovery Plug-In feature gives you the capability to research information from resources such as Google, Wikipedia, Delicious including IMAGES, VIDEOS, TEXT

Once you’ve found the information you were looking for you can easily drop it into a node within a map

Even create your own plugins or have a 3^rd party write the plugins to accomplish your business goals.

Currently, Spinscape allows teams or groups to collaborate on a project in real time anywhere in

Spinscape.com

the world. New features are added each month. One of the more recent features includes the ability to add music (.mid) files to the mind mapping document created when collaborating with colleagues or team members.

Registration at Spinscape.com is quick and simple. When you first sign up, you receive access to a premium account for the first 30 days. You can continue with the premium account for $9.99 a month or $100 a year. Premimum account features include,

Premium users enjoy all of the features included with a free account–and MORE. You can add attachments, access additional plugins and utilize enhanced collaboration features such as shared editing and real-time chat! See the chart below for more details. Then get the full functionality of Premium for a low monthly price or an even lower annual price!

I thought Spinscape was going to be an exciting new tool but the collaborative piece and chat features are only available as part of the premium subscription and not accessible with the free account. With Google documents and the upcoming Google Wave chat feature available soon within Google docs, I can’t see paying for services when there are quality alternatives available for free. Spinscape isn’t so free after all – bummer.

What is Gogglepedia?

I knew it wouldn’t be long before Google somehow combined resources with Wikipedia. Sure enough, there is now a search tool called ‘Googlepedia’ for Firefox/Mozilla browser users. I use Flock exclusively and added the Googlepedia add-on to my browser and gave it a trial run.

After performing a search for Googlepedia , I received the following search results:

Googlepedia

Links to sites resulting from my search are listed on the left and on the right side of the page is a Wikipedia entry on the keyword used in the search. Often times I have wanted a definition as well as sites that used a term I was searching for and with this add-on I am able to have links to websites featuring the searched term as well as any related Wikipedia entries. I will definitely use this feature often and so excited about this time saving feature in search results. Thanks Google!