YouTube EDU

YouTube EDU: YouTube, which is owned by Google has started a separate section catering solely to education. It is a collection of channels of many colleges and universities and contains video lectures from these colleges and universities.

Presently, YouTube EDU is only offering their service to qualifying two- and four-year degree granting public and private colleges and universities. Hopefully, they will soon extend their services to K-12 schools also. It will be really great if K-12 teachers could have a platform where they did not have to worry about the content of the videos that are displayed. Although, presently, they can always use TeacherTube as a great alternative. It caters specifically to educational videos.

This new venture is a result of Google's 20 percent concept, which is part of Google's philosophy, where employees use 80% of their time working on their designated work and 20% of their time on projects that interest them. Many features of Google and many products launched by Google have been the result of this 20 percent time.


Listed below are two articles about YouTube EDU:
YouTube EDU launches.
YouTube EDU Brings Free Education to the Masses.


Another site mentioned in the second article listed above is Academic Earth, which also contains a database of lectures from various educational institutions. This is also a great resource.

Google Docs

Google Docs

Recently, during a conversation with a fellow educator, I learned that some schools do not allow students to save files on the school server in order to save space. It just so happened that I was going to talk about Google Apps that day. What a perfect solution! Using Google Apps would keep both parties happy. You could have students do their work using the various Google Apps and not have to worry about using any of the school's server space.

Google Docs could be perfect for individual projects as well as collaborative projects. For example, if your students are working on a collaborative language project, let's say a project about family, they could collaborate and brainstorm on a Google Doc and then present the project using Google Presentation.

Here is a video about Google Docs in Language Teaching:


Here is a great slideshow about ways to use Google Docs in education. It is not specifically for language education but you can definitely get ideas from it: 15 Interesting Ways to Use Google Docs in the Classroom.

Google Apps in Education

GOOGLE APPS FOR EDUCATORS

Google offers a variety of applications that can be used to share information, photos, presentations, etc. These tools can also be used to collaborate.
The Google apps for education is a series of apps that are offered to educational institutions free of cost. Here is a video that explains why you should consider the Google Apps Education Edition:

Ten Reasons To Use Google Apps

Google Goes To School