My heart darn near skipped a beat at the thought of it.  Could you imagine it?  No gmail, gchat, gtalk,  google calendar, google docs, google maps, google search, google earth, google alerts, no blogger, and alas no iGoogle – no google anything!  And this is an actual assignment for Michelle’s daughter to do for her New Media Research class. And her assignment includes no YouTube either!!

Oh my!  Could I do it? Um … NOPE.  Not a chance!  And then it dawned on me just how reliant I’ve become on one company’s products.  I hadn’t meant to, I didn’t do it deliberately and I certainly didn’t realise it – til now.  I can’t think of any other aspect of my life (even financially) where I’ve literally put all my “eggs in one basket.”

How many Google products do you rely on?  All the ones I use religiously (that’s on a day to day basis) are listed in the first paragraph.  I am so dependent on Google. I really need to think seriously about how to manage if Google “went down”  (as she’s frantically touching wood so that doesn’t happen)!  Over the past week our school server has been hit with a virus that no one has the fix for.  Work with the internet in the classroom has all but ground to a halt.  Today my students alternated between reading their books and writing with a pencil while we waited patiently for pages on our blog to load.  At least we had the books and pencils as an alternative.  But that’s my point really.  What alternative do I have for all the google apps I use?

What about you?  Could you go a week without google?  Are all your eggs in one basket too?

In just few short minutes Chris has just taught the entire room some very useful tips for searching “smarter” with Google, how to use basic search syntax and Google Advance Search.

Chris’s session was extremely interactive – he had us all searching and learning in a fun way.  The Google quiz was great – I like the fact that you needed to apply your search techniques – great for doing with our students – and the last question was excellent because it required a deeper level of thinking/synthesizing – kinda like Blooms Taxonomy thinking.

I especially enjoyed the Spaghetti growing on Trees Video and the link to the Tree Octopus website bought back memories of my entire Year 7 class a couple of years ago being completely fooled by this site when we were learning about the validity of websites and information on the internet and how do you know.

Even more informative was the discussion we had about Wikipedia.  In just a few minutes (again) Chris was able to explain the ins and outs of Wikipedia’s questionable validity and truthfulness in such a way that the majority of us could go back and explain the exact same thing to our students.

This session was fabulous practical session and I am so grateful to have been reminded about the Google for Educators website (bookmarked in my delicious account but certainly not looked at closely).  Even better are the resources we now have on our ISB Cert. Ed. Tech. & Informational Literacy wiki, (COETAIL.Asia) available at our fingertips (and we’ve experienced them) to help us teach ourselves and our students what’s real and how do you know and how can you find out and can you tell the difference?

Thanks Chris – great way to spend the afternoon and thanks so much for sharing your expertise with us.  Hope Kim and Jeff ask you back for another session!