When doodling in class is okay...

Google is very educator-friendly - at least for this educator. But they also take care to support education whenever possible. They provide versions of Google Apps (their web- and email-hosting plan, which I use for techieteacher) and Google SketchUp (a 3D-modeling program, with which you can create models to integrate into Google Earth). The Google Education Summit brings Googlers together with representatives of higher education institutions. And now they're getting K-12 involved...well, sort of.

Have you ever seen some of the Google doodles that appear in place of the logo for holidays or significant historic dates? Did you catch the 25th anniversary of TCP/IP this past New Year's Day? Or the 2007 holiday series? The 2006 World Cup? Louis Braille's birthday? Or one of my favorites, National Teacher Day from May 2005? (Want to see more? Go here.) Well, now it's students' turn. Doodle 4 Google gets school-age kids involved in asking "What if...?" and incorporating their answer to the question in a doodle using the Google logo. The grand prize is a $10,000 scholarship, computers for the winner and his or her school, a trip to the GooglePlex, and more. And, of course, their artwork displayed on the Google homepage - how many people are going to see that? How cool...

It's a very interesting idea... I'm going to run it by teachers and administrators at my school to see what they think. A little extra technology couldn't hurt.

Google's lost a little of its luster...

Ever since my high school friend Craig went to Stanford to study computer science, met up with these two guys who were starting up a little search engine, and became the first employee and technical director of Google, I've been a fan. Aside from the fact that such a mega-company follows a mantra of "Don't be evil," and treats its employees well with such perks as rock-climbing walls and no-charge gourmet restaurants, I've always liked it because it simply makes a good product. From services developed in the Google Labs - like its original search engine, Gmail, and Google Maps - to those it has acquired as part of its vision - like Grand Central, YouTube, Writely, and Picasa - not a day goes by that I don't use some Google product online.

But now I find that my eye has begun to wander to another very attractive, if much less well-known, name on the web: Zoho. While it doesn't quite roll off the tongue like Google does, Zoho has a serious suite of web-based applications which not only encompass more features than the comparable apps in Google Docs - it has more applications, such as a database manager (Zoho Creator), web conferencing (Zoho Meeting), online organizer (Zoho Planner), and project management software (Zoho Projects). While I haven't yet had a chance to delve deeply into all of the applications, I suspect that it may become my new favorite web-toy.

While an entirely online office suite may not be the most appropriate for schools to use exclusively, it does present some interesting options:

• Zoho Meeting could allow teachers and students to conduct online study sessions, or even teleconference in other classrooms for a collaborative lesson.
• Documents and presentations could be imported into Zoho Writer and Zoho Show, which in turn could be imported into Zoho Notebook to create a virtual professional learning conference - or to make all of the materials from a face-to-face conference available to a wider audience.
• Zoho Wiki could be used by a teacher to create a class webpage - or by students to create a wiki study guide on their current unit of study.

There are plenty more possibilities - check out Zoho yourself, and let me know what you think! Better yet, let Zoho know - it appears that the Zoho support team checks their forums regularly, and are quick to implement suggestions from users.