Dynamic collaboration with Google Apps

I absolutely love Google apps for many of the same reasons I love Macs - intuitive ways to interconnect different tools that interest you to customize your experience. Here are some of the Google apps I've been working with

• Google docs - includes text documents,  spreadsheets, and presentations (hmmm....sounds like Office....)
• Google sites - allows you to make pretty spiffy websites for free. 
• "my maps" in Google maps - allows you to make personalized pin placement maps, great for presentations and for highlighting geographical patterns
• Google Groups - basically the topic/comment discussion setup
• Google Calendars - can be displayed within docs/sites, or subscribed to externally
• Google photos - set up folders that many can access or add to
• Google news - personalize news to your interests - how about all the latest on "bacteria" for example?

There are others too like Google Scholar, but the ones above I'll highlight. Remember that one of the great things Google allows is for collaborative design. You can set up permissions so that certain people can also add/edit the document/folder/calendar, etc. so that it's a dynamic document/folder/calendar. 

Let me give an example from - interestingly enough - a website I set up for Evan's baseball team. (https://sites.google.com/site/vlfyanks/) using Google Sites. The site is set up so that the head coach and myself can edit any of the material at any time. We each also had authorship power on a Google calendar that was specifically set up for the team and is displayed there too. Anyone who subscribed to the calendar would automatically receive updates on their phone/computer/etc. when Ben or I updated it (which happens a lot in rec baseball....). A folder was set up in Google Photos (Picasa) that all of the parents had authorship on. This allowed any of us to dump in cool photos we had so that we could share them with others. I also constructed a map in Google Maps that showed were all of the rec fields were so people could find them if there was a rescheduling (see the bottom map on the page linked here). An RSS feed (link) was available that allowed folks to get info that way too. 

Way too cool. Most importantly, the collaborative nature of these tools really makes them powerful. There should be plenty of applications for teaching and departmental stuff. With the collaborative Biology Alumni Database (using Google documents spreadsheet) we've already started this.

Reasonable cost personalized posters for office/lab

Seeing the quality of the posters that we got for research conferences from Media Services I decided to try making a personal poster for my office. Grabbed a bunch of my favorite photos taken at pretty good resolution, placed them into my Powerpoint template for a 24"Hx36"L poster, added a black border and had them print it up on Super Gloss.

So for just under $20 I got a personalized poster for my office that looks pretty good too. Turnaround time was 2 days from when I submitted it. 

First glance at Google plus

a former student (Will Elias) was kind enough to invite me to Google Plus - the only way you can join it at the moment (Google's way of generating buzz). Google+ is Google's answer to Facebook.

It's in the early phases of development but there are a couple of neat things I see so far:
- the ability to interconnect the Google Apps with the social media. I'm a big fan of Google Apps so I'm curious to see how this develops

- the ability to more effectively partition out what news/information goes to what group of people in your "friends" list. Of course, one of the first things that stands out is that Google does away with "friends" and replaces it with your "circles" which is a big plus over Facebook. So now, every posting you have gets connected to a particular circle of people that you've defined as friends, acquantances, people you follow, etc. (it's more than just a wording thing).  So now students can post comments from the outing with their friends the night before and not worry about their profs seeing it! Seriously though, what intrigues me about this feature is that now you might just build up a ton  of contacts of people that you know in any capacity, but you can easily partition out how you interact with them in this media. For example, I was thinking that now I would consider asking students to connect with me through this since I could add them to a, say, "bio321 circle" which would not get personal information posted there.

- G+ also has a way to interconnect with people via video/IM in a controlled manner through what they call their "hangout rooms". Technically I could start a hangout room that was only available to Bio321 students so they could drop in if they wanted. This might be useful for virtual office hours or even for teaching in the event of sickness. One thing I didn't see is a way to show a Google Presentation in there (Google's equiv. of powerpoint) which would make it even cooler for teaching potential, but I did email that suggestion into Google.

Should be interesting to see this develop. There's enough backing with Google Apps here at Elon that it wouldn't be a hard transition for most of the students, although I'm not sure that will be the case nationwide since Facebook is pretty entrenched. Still, it's hard to not like the interconnectivity of G+ with Google Apps - sort of like the allure of the Mac system applications

If anyone in the department is interested in playing around with it let me know - once you get invited it lets you invite 50 other people, so I can pass that on to you.