Google Apps for Education

The article Hands-On with Google Docs for iPad and iPhone is a nice, brief introduction to mobile use of Google Docs.  As author John Paul Titlow summarizes: “In a nutshell, the experience of editing and managing Google Docs from iOS devices is pretty good.”

After the Spring term 2011, Holy Cross students were moved from Groupwise email to Gmail. The Google environment is much more than just email, providing a rich selection of applications with wide use in scholarship and research. Below I introduce some of the Google Apps that are potentially useful in higher education.

Gmail (mail.google.com) [Help for Gmail.]
Gmail gives regular users over 7gb of storage for email; apparently this has recently been boosted to 25gb for educational users.  This sizeable amount of storage makes it possible to archive much of your email messages in addition to using Gmail as a storage medium for attached files. You can also organize your archived messages by applying one or more labels.

Calendar (calendar.google.com) [Help for Google Calendar.]
Schedule appointments, tasks, and reminders. You can also set up a rule in your Groupwise mail to automatically forward incoming Groupwise appointments to your Google calendar. Click here to see how to export your Groupwise calendar and bring it into Google Calendar. Google Calendar can be displayed in various formats (day, week, month, agenda, year, etc.).  You can also add other calendars of interest such as national and international holidays, phases of the moon, Red Sox games, Star Trek stardates (not kidding), etc.

Documents (docs.google.com) [Help for Google Docs.]
Google Docs can be used as a free substitute for office suites like Microsoft Office and Open Office, although it is not as full-featured as those products. Nevertheless, Google Docs is a very decent word processor, and documents can be downloaded in Microsoft Word format in addition to Open Office, HTML, PDF, and Rich Text.  It is also possible to use Google Docs with the RefWorks citation manager to produce formatted literature citations. Other document types include presentations, spreadsheets, and drawings.

Reader (reader.google.com) [Help for Google Reader.]
Google Reader is an “aggregator” that collects feeds from newspapers, magazines, scholarly journals, online discussion groups, and other sources of Web-based information. By collecting many sources of information in one place, Reader saves you the time of visiting the same Web sites over and over again. When used with a tool such as Read It Later, Google Reader becomes a powerful tool for scholarly research.

Sites (sites.google.com) [Help for Google Sites.]
Google Sites is a free platform for Web hosting. Numerous design templates are provided for designing your own Web site, which can either be visible to the world or only to certain specified individuals.

Maps (maps.google.com) [Help for Google Maps.]
Google Maps provides global navigation, mapping, route planning, and viewing of 3D terrain with an optional free browser plugin. Maps can also generate HTML code that allows embedding maps into your own Web pages and sending links to maps via email.  You can also create and store maps on your personal Google Maps account.

News (news.google.com) [Help for Google News.]
A home page that can be customized with a broad range of news sources. There is also a search facility.

Translate (translate.google.com) [Help for Google Translate.]
Instantly translate text, Web pages, and files between over 50 languages. It will even speak to you.

Books (books.google.com) [Help for Google Books.]
“Search the latest index of the world’s books. Find millions of great books you can preview or read for free.” From Wikipedia: “Books in the public domain are available in a ‘full view’ and free for download. . . .The initiative has been hailed for its potential to offer unprecedented access to what may become the largest online corpus of human knowledge and promoting the democratization of knowledge, but it has also been criticized for potential copyright violations.”

Scholar (scholar.google.com) [Help for Google Scholar.]
“Google Scholar provides a simple way to broadly search for scholarly literature. From one place, you can search across many disciplines and sources: articles, theses, books, abstracts and court opinions, from academic publishers, professional societies, online repositories, universities and other web sites. Google Scholar helps you find relevant work across the world of scholarly research.” With the free RefGrab-It tool for RefWorks, citations can be imported from Google Scholar results directly into your RefWorks database. Full text of articles are often available on Google Scholar.

Panoramio (www.panoramio.com) [Help for Panoramio.]
“Panoramio is a community-powered site for exploring places through photography: cities, natural wonders, or anywhere you might go. . . .Panoramio is different from other photo sharing sites because the photos illustrate places. . . .Every Panoramio photo is a candidate for transfer to the Google Earth Panoramio layer.” Your personal Panoramio account has a URL (Web address) that you can give out so others can access your images. If you upload geotagged photos to Panoramio, you can locate them on Google Maps and Google Earth.

iGoogle (www.google.com/ig)
iGoogle is a home page that can collect and organize all of your Google apps and other information into one place.  Using “gadgets,” which are plug-in graphical interface modules, you can customize iGoogle with all manner of information feeds.

Mobile (google.com/mobile)
Most of the Google Apps are available in mobile form through your smartphone’s Web browser. You can also download a free Google mobile app to your mobile phone that lets you do Google searches by voice as well as by typing in search terms. You can also take a photo using your phone’s camera, for example of a bar code, and the Google mobile app can do a search based on the image. The Google mobile app also has links to all of the other various Google apps, and is available for all major smartphone brands.

Some good tutorials on Gmail, Calendar, Docs, Sites, and other Google apps can be found here.