“edWeb.net is your one stop shop for professional development opportunities. I enjoy becoming a part of the various online communities. By doing so, I am able to increase my technology tool box as well as collaborate with fellow teachers.”

We are delighted to post this article by Brittany Fowler, a Freed-Hardeman University student in the M.Ed. in Instructional Technology Program:

I would like to highly recommend to my fellow educators a website called edweb.net. Once you set up an account the possibilities are unlimited. A plethora of professional development opportunities will become available for you to view.

I would like to share information about a webinar that I watched. The presenter was Mr. Shannon Holden.  The title of the webinar is “Using Google Drive to Streamline the Teaching and Learning Process”. The various features of Google Drive were discussed extensively.  If you are a novice with using Google drive or whether you are very seasoned, I advise you to take time to view this webinar.

As instructional technologists, we will likely present different technologies to our staff. In order for our teachers to be on board, Mr. Holden made a great point by sharing three criterion for teachers to approve and utilize new technology. The first is the technology must be cheap or free. The second the technology should be easy to implement. The final criterion is that the technology should save the teacher time and effort. Google drive meets all three of these criterion. One great aspect to using Google Drive is that you get 15 GB of FREE space with your account. When working on documents in Drive, this opens the door for real-time collaboration of a document by several people at the same time. This benefit opens the door for teacher flexibility and collaboration 24/7.

Once you create files in Google Drive many options are available for users. You are able to:

• Preview documents
• Share documents
• Star documents
• Download documents

The days of having to save two copies are almost obsolete with Google Drive. Each and every time you make changes to your document, the changes are automatically saved and updated on every device. Once you share documents with others, you are able to view the file activity. The file activity will show you which users are editing the document, who has viewed the document, and last time it was opened.

During the webinar, many of the viewers were participating in the live chat. Viewers made reference to Pinterest boards that they had created that are all things google. I began looking at all the available resources. WOW! Before I knew it, I had spent two hours reading blog after blog of new information on Google Drive. I hope you take the time to view this webinar and any of the other webinars created by Mr Holden.

edWeb.net is your one stop shop for professional development opportunities. I enjoy becoming a part of the various online communities. By doing so, I am able to increase my technology tool box as well as collaborate with fellow teachers.