Your GCS Google Account Explained

My what?! account?

I know we have faculty at various levels of exposure to Google and their Google account, so in an attempt to build the foundation. The following post occurred...

So a few years ago everyone employed at GCS had a Greensburg Domain Google Account created for them and for a couple years or more they just kind of sat dormant. The reason for the inactivity was in part due to the Google Services being early in their development and thus were basic and sometimes buggy. Secondarily they (Google online services) just didn't fill a need yet.

Google has since put a lot of time and effort into building it's presence in the Education world. The Google suite of online services, such as Docs, Slides, and Sheets has grown into a robust set of collaborative tools perfect for the classroom.

Your GCS Google account is your school administered Google account for accessing all of that and more and consists of your email address and a password. It differs from a personal Google account in that it is owned and controlled by the school system which allows some services to be available while others are disabled. For instance, Gmail is currently disabled while Youtube is enabled. 

Docs, Slides, Sheets and What else?

Docs, Slides, and Sheets are Google's free alternatives to Microsoft's Word, PowerPoint, and Excel respectively and they exist in your online storage Google Drive. For more information on Google Docs, Slides, and / or Sheets click here. While at times they lack the power features you may rely on MS Office for the Google Apps are rock stars in the world of online collaboration and leveraging the power of the Internet. (Aspects we hope to highlight and promote in the coming months / year through multifaceted PD opportunities!)

Your GCS Google account also provides you access to your school based Google Plus account, Youtube channel, Google Site, Blogger pager, Google Hangouts, and more. They are all just tools in the toolbox! 

What else? Well last but not least is access to the Chrome store to further customize and add functionality to Google Chrome. 

Drive.

Drive is your online storage space, similar to your U drive here at GCS only much higher capacity; 30 GB's worth or more than 30X the space of your U drive! You can upload existing files to drive or create new ones using Docs, Slides, etc... but they are all accessible to you from any location with Internet access!

Files in Drive are immediately ready to be shared with anyone you invite and depending on the filetype they are immediately ready to be edited and commented on by people you invite. 

Here is quick demo of one way to login to Drive:

Since Drive is a Google service logging into it also logs you into Google.

Lastly, when you log in you may be prompted to "link data" and that is something you generally are going to want to do. Linking data will synchronize your bookmarks, settings, extensions, etc... to that Chrome profile. It erases the problems of missing bookmarks because you are not at "your" computer.


Stay Positive.

2048

The popular tile-based puzzle game

I kept seeing this on computer screens as I worked in classrooms at the High School. I could tell it was a game of sorts but that was about it. Honestly, I didn't think to much about it until I was watching the filter statistics and saw repeated searches for "2048". I thought to myself, "that is an odd year to search for..." but come to find out it was the game they were searching for!

I did a quick investigation to discover that it is game written by a 19-year old Italian man in his weekend spare time! He drew inspiration from an existing game, 3's which is conceptually the same. After playing for a short time I can see why people enjoy this game. It is like the game Othello; simple and complicated at the same time.

Here are some things I find appealing about all of this:

• A motivated, self taught, young adult created and published this (own your education!)
• It was built upon inspiration drawn from an existing App / Game (tinker!)
• The number of young people I see engaged in a puzzle based elegant game (data analysis!)
• A world-wide audience is connected to a "weekend project"(International potential!)

It is an amazing time to be alive! Next time you see a student playing this game take the opportunity to give it the Paul Harvey treatment and "tell the rest of the story". 

Stay Positive!