I admit it, I'm a groupie for this googler!

Robin:"Cindy,how do you like my hour long personal training session with Google Earth?"

Cindy: "THIS IS AWESOME...*just when I thought I knew Google Earth...."

Sigh, I'm a groupie...yep, Robin, who works for Google is THE MAIN MAN when it comes to Google Earth. Allison Merrick connected me to him in the morning, and I was lucky enough to pick his brain for over an hour by myself. Wow, I have so many new tools in my GE toolbox!

EVEN MORE GOOGLE GOODNESS

I

AM

SO

LUCKY!!

I have three other friends, Google Certified St. Louis Teachers to play with now...

Bill, Stephanie and Josh..yep, we're presenting at the METC together...PLNs...ironic, eh?

Yeah, NONE of us can wipe the smiles off our faces cause we played in the Chicago GOOGLE OFFICES allllll day!

GOOGLE DOCS ROCK ( I heart FORMS!!!)

Whew, deep breath, just got done doing an all day training with 27 of my Lindbergh Teachers. We have started our path on the ELITE II Program. and by Dec 1st, we will have 99 Teachers rockin..

In the past, we have used my free zoomerang account to configure an assessment piece, and I always had to worry about printing it out before it ended (hey the free one works like that!) and it....is....soooooo .... yesterday!

Today, I made a GOOGLE FORM, incorporating all of my assessment questions, I then took the URL and threw it in www.metamark.net to make a short URL and then they went online and filled it out...prints out as a pdf (so I can give it to my boss) and these Teachers are so lucky!! Not only do they get all of the deep PD that goes with ELITE, but they also get to be Googlized...and they liked it!!!

Say cheese!

I just got done reading an article about photos which should never have been posted online. Hello? Maybe, these people should think twice, no, in these particular instances they should reflect three times before putting their stoopid pictures online for the world and their employers to see.

I have to tip my hat though to the "smartest" man. He was soo proud of the fact he had won a body building strong man competition and not only had pictures of his buff body in a speedo for the world to see, but a video was on youtube also! It would have been great, however, he had just been awarded disability because of back problems two weeks before the contest. wow...I hope his back feels better soon, cause he is going to be spending quite a bit of time standing in the unemployment line.

We should take these real life stories and share with students the stupidity, unethical, you fill in the blank circumstances and learn from them. We can start with character education and go up to ethics and end up in COMMON SENSE...hopefully!

Wii fit age = 87

...and that's ok, cause Dad IS 87 and did pretty darn good hitting those soccer balls on the wii fit!

Now, we gotta get him on roller blades!!

My Vista View

Is Vista a vermin? Seems NOBODY that I listen to has anything good to say about it.

I was listening to two grad students last night whining about the fact that VISTA had lost two very important files, (meaning papers that were due)..yes, they went through the proper search means and found nothing...scary...

So, I jumped in and talked about "cloud computing"..a concept they hadn't heard of (it's so cool to explain something new to grad students!)

So, I explained had they kept those files in google docs, they would still have them, they would be "in the clouds" so to speak...yep, we learn lessons everyday. I didn't bother to tell them I learned my lesson the hard way too! There is nothing worse than being done with a paper--go to send it in..and poof...magically GONE!

VISTA...my viewpoint.

Learning beliefs

I'm working on a class and I'm attempting to make this awesome glogster piece (professor will either love it or hate it!) and TWICE, I'm 3 seconds from hitting the publish key and ZAP! POOF! Gone, history page laughs at me and I'm gonna try O N E more time and then seek another idea out...
Glogster? You can embed, video, mp3, links, jpgs...I'm in love with it, unless it refuses my affection (again!) on the third try!