The Importance of Google Media as Educational Media for worldwide Classroom

By: Lakasianus Tamnau 69110001 Key words: Instructional,Google media, education, students. Abstract: The need to consider media as an educational tools differences will increase dramatically as well, since the globalization of education has been increasing dramatically. To teach and study successfully in a global network, online learning systems must be designed to anticipate user choices in different educational settings. This article emphasizes the importance of google media as educational media for "global classroom". At first, the terminology is examined and the different levels analyzed where education process occurs. A number of various dimensions of education-related differences shows how education can affect the acceptance and use of google as online learning systems. Upon this analysis this article suggests design guidelines to make learning systems educatively appropriate and concludes with overview of the 'google' media, explore the uniqueness of the google media and its characteristics. Introduction Education refers to the process of learning and acquiring information. Education can be divided into two main types: formal learning through an institution such as a school and selftaught learning or what is often termed life experience. Generally, education is important for learning basic life skills, as well as learning advanced skills that can make a person more attractive in the job market.(http://www.wisegeek.com/what-is-education.htm) Due to the interactivity and ubiquity of the Internet learning, is possible without space and time barriers. The students and instructors are connected through a digital medium, which replaces the physical, geographically delimited meeting space. Education around the world is becoming strongly networked, and we are beginning to see fundamental changes taking place in the organization of education. We no longer have geographical isolation at the school, college and university level. The long-term implications are a worldwide network and a real marketplace for university and college level education. This will expand naturally into vocational and adult training as well. Education will become a major export factor between countries (Harasim et al., 1995). But "educational products" aren't adaptable to every country and educational environment, actually. Media is even a critical influence factor on the acceptance and use of learning systems. This phenomenon can be analyzed from two different perspectives: - Institutional perspective: Multinational companies already train their employees via online learning networks globally. ELearning as a new buzzword for web-based education and the commercializing of it (e.g., business strategies, technologies, applications, etc.) is a growing market. Education will be exported between countries with even the most different aspects like culture and language. In this case, google as an educational media hand over a main contribution for the institution. - Learning perspective: The Internet and computer-mediated communication offer educators unique opportunities and challenges. Students can be provided access to learning networks anytime and anywhere. However, educational factors will play a bigger role in the global context. Learners study collaboratively in multicultural teams. Instructors from different area/place, teach and facilitate students from any kind of educational background. What could be the possible influence of educational differences on the acceptance and use of online learning environments? Despite these potentials of web-based education and the importance of educational lfactors, there is a paucity of research that systematically analyzes education-related variables to suggest design guidelines for education-related, flexible, online learning environments. This paper focuses on these issues by analyzing the importance of google media as educational media for online education. Google is an Educational Media Most of people who use Internet know about Google. But if you ask them what is google, they will answer: Google is a search engine for any kind of information. Basically, google has prepared everything that can be used as a instructional media for students. There are some important points about education and collaboration tools, that can be found in google which can be really convenient and useful when it comes to encourage students to participate

and engaged into their own education process, sharing, collaborating and co-working. Nothing more and nothing less than a comprehensive idea and list of Google Tools for Teachers and Students. Most teachers do not encourage students to get to know all Google tools and how much we can do with it, no need to go further away and search for other tools. Of course, there are specialized tools that will make things easier and faster, but remember that tools can only be a way to help students and teachers, make the planning, the strategy of learning, related with educational process inside the classroom. Here are some tools of Google for educational learning process which also explain how important the tools for educators and students. 1. Google Advanced Search Its not definitely the most difficult tool to use, which makes it simple and fast for us to get the best out of our queries. When we usually need to find anything fast, just use Advanced Search, because we dont get thousand of millions results and it makes it easier. From all options the favorite is the one that allows students to chose a document format, pdf, txt, etc, it just makes it easier to find whitepapers, essays, articles, presentation. 2. Google Advanced Image Search If students or educators needs any kind of image, the advanced image search its a must. Theres a few interesting features in the search, such as face, clip-art, line drawings, size, B6W or color, format file BMP, JPEG, PNG Plus we can filter photos according to usage rights: licensed or not, so you know if you can use them; another interesting filter is a panoramic, wide, tall, option, and even find images inside a domain. 3. Google Advanced News Search News can be a very refreshing and essential source of information for Students and the teacher must encourage them to pay attention to them. One of the main issues with the organic search in Google is that it mostly depends on SEO and optimized sites, not on updates, which means teacher can try to find news about the moebious rope and find pages and pages of news from years ago. The Advanced News Search most interesting feature is that we can chose a period of time for the results, which is really interesting for Students to even see how news have different perspectives in time. It also allows to chose the news source: The New York Times, El Pas, The Times as well as location (not just local news), and finally, of course, we can get results regarding the place where or subjetcs or keywords appear: tittle, body, or even URL. 4. Google Advanced Blog Search Blogs have become an essential source of information and collaboration for students to engage not only in reading and sharing, but in writing their own blogs. We can find articles and post from expertise to learners experiences How to and lists of useful tools and sites is mostly an average topic for most blogs. Students can compare different blogs, chose those who are more useful for what they are doing, save and bookmark the most influential blogs and lets not forget about starting their owns. The advanced blog search is a very useful tool regarding the rise of blogging sites and the thousand articles written a day. We can perform a blog search according to date, author, topics, keywords, language and even into one blog itself.

5. Google Advanced Book Search

If teacher or students need to find a book or get some bibliographic references, Google can be nothing but a huge laberynth where instead of finding what they are looking for, they will possible get lost. Students need to learn how to look for bibliography and similar resources to their essays. And thats when the advanced search becomes essential. When they perform a search on Google Books, they will find some books contents: some of them are full view and others limited preview, and of course they can look up for an author, title, publisher, date, ISBN or ISSN. Plus theres books, magazines and Google eBooks. 6. Google Scholar This tools is specially designed for education and academics. It allows students and teacher, as well as researchers, to perform a search focused on expertise articles in different knowledge fileds such as maths, physics, arts, literature, and biology. Students can chose different filters: author, location, magazines, opinions, legal journals, publisher, subject area, etc. 7. Google Earth

Theres no doubt that Google Maps and Google Earth are meant to be two essential in geography and even physics as a interesting reference for students. Besides, if we have a LCD projector, we can simply plug our computer to it and we will have an interactive multimedia resource: remember an image can do much more for students than a thousand texts. On the left side panel of Google Earth we will find several options: search, save locations and layers of information on the the maps. 3D, satellite and street views, rulers that will help students find out distances, get Earth or Space views, coordinates, altitude, routes, incidence of sunlight. Also, we can see solar system, planets, stars, get to know cities and its most famous and popular monuments and sights, take a look to urban or coutry landscapes, learn how to make maps, learn how to look for directions, for the north, calculate distances and perimeters. One of the most interesting features for education is that Google Earth is integrated with Google Maps, Picasa and Panoramio. 8. Google Translate Alright, so probably the translations arent the most accurate or precise, but we can still work on it and understand the texts, which is the important thing when it comes to another language. The Translator is not only for words, but for full texts and pages. If you do have a blog or site, you can add iGoogle, a very interesting widget that connects to Translator and translate the content. Students sometimes find interesting articles that they cannot read because they are in another language and they are not translated, so they simply skip it. With Translator we are not just helping them find that interesting topic and getting to read them but maybe theres a chance they will get interested in the language itself, so somehow we are encouraging them to learn new languages, not to mention that another language is another culture and perspective of the world. 9. Gmail Besides being one of the mos popular and used emails, it fully integrates with all Google accounts, which means you will only need your email account to access all other tools. It has voice and video chat, making communications and cooperation with contact easier and faster, in real time. IT has a very powerful spam filter and IMAP and POP access, 7 GB of space. It makes communications dynamic and fluent between contacts and groups.

10. Google Calendar

Students have no more excuses for forgetting tests, due dates, activities, etc, because with Google Calendar, teachers and students can share their tasks and events. Yes, it is not just to take control of teachers own calendar, but sharing the events and tasks with a group and/or contacts. This tools also performs alerts via email or text to mobile phones, so teacher will never be late or forget a test! 11. Google Docs One of the most popular collaboration tools not just for education but business and enterprise. It allows you to share documents and files. It simply is a collaborative tool that students can use to create and generate group documents, based on crowdsourcing contents, and sharing. Its very useful not just for teahers but for working groups of students who need to write essays, make presentations, etc. Teacher can import and export documents and access them from every place, teacher will never lose a document again. It also allows auto evaluation and real time progress and notes. 12. Google Reader Its a another interesting tool if the teacher prefer having all feeds together in one page: with this tools teacher will never have to visit 20 site to get updates and news, just enter the Reader and find all the content right there. For students, so can also share their feeds and reader with mates, this tools is very helpful to be always updated and save time. 13. Google Groups A perfect tool for creating groups and share, collaborate and co-work. Students engage in conversations and discussions in different areas and fields and learn to postulate, listen, learn from others, and mostly, communicate. Its great to get those shy students into conversation. 14. Google Buzz

Buzz is a very simple and easy tool to share photo, video, updates, etc. It send comment directly to inbox and can connect to Twitter, Picasa, Flickr and Google Reader. Students can participate in conversations and give opinions on pieces of art, essays, books, just anything. Its always updated so discussions are always interesting and encouraging. 15. Google Realtime This is a more specific search for last minute news and updates on blogs, articles and news. It will also show trends and conversations. Very interesting to make students realize how important being up-to.date is in such a connected world where information is power. 16. Youtube About this one, students will probably know a lot more than the teacher do, but remember, teacher can teach them how to use it for learning and sharing. They can search interesting videos on subjects and seminars, listen to great speakers and create their own videos to share with mates and others. Teachers can also use it connecting the computer to a LCD projector. 17. Blogger Blogger is one of the main blogging platforms. Its easy and simple to use and will empower writing skills on students: do not forget how much teacher complain about students, even college ones, skill. Its a very good and interesting activity for a group to have a blog as a magazine and share thoughts, news, and everything, they can distribute different tasks and topics to write about, edit, design, etc. Instructional/learning process as an affecting factor of the acceptance, use, and impact of web-based learning systems appears at different levels and in various dimensions. Therefore, the critical issue for the design of such web-based systems is how such a variety of educationarelated dimensions and variables can be reflected. Collis argues (Collis, 1999) that "at the institutional, instructor, or even student level, a www.based course-support system must be designed to anticipate user choices about a large number of variables, each of which have different optimal values in different cultural settings" (p. 6). The key issue for her is to design a system for flexibility from the very beginning. Based on her design guidelines for web-based course support sites and systems the following three categories are introduced (c. f. 4): flexibility/variety, simplicity and reflection/awareness. The purpose is to reach the highest degree of flexibility and accommodation to anticipate cultural differences. Google as an educational media has some overplus for learners and educators: a. Flexibility/Variety: 1. Google has plan for flexibility and adaptation: there are many goals can be gained from google as an instructional media. 2. Design for instructional flexibility: e.g. courses of different lengths, examination or assessment requirements should be possible. 3. Offer a "technological tool set" of different communication channels: e.g.provide asynchronous as well as synchronous communication tools. The users determine the style and use of channels. Design for human-human communication, not human-computer interaction. 4. Offer a "methodical tool set", so that a variety of different roles for both instructors and students and a variety of types of learning experiences can be implemented. 5. Offer a "resource tool set", so that a variety of combinations of supplementary media and resources can be used in the instructional setting (e.g., multimedia materials, links to external web-based materials). b. Simplicity: 1. Design for minimal technical equipment and user levels. 2. Design the text fixed on the screen to a minimum: use a minimum of graphic and iconic elements and provide context-sensitive help. 3. Keep it simple for the students 4. Limit the information and communication that is preset in the system. Supplement study materials, to integrate and manage student study activities. The sites should be filled by the instructor and students in their own ways as the course proceeds. 5. Keep it simple for the instructors because they have little or no time in creating electronic course material.

Collaboration and communication are more than life skills they are essential abilities that the students will need to succeed in their professional lives. Google as a educational media, offers a range of online tools and services that provide secure communication and collaboration capabilities to every school and let the teacher choose the solutions that best meet the users unique needs. Since todays students live in a digital world, connecting with them, and engaging them in real learning, increasingly requires the creation of opportunities that align with their technology needs and expectations. Google can help teacher to meet those requirements by providing tools which enable next-generation teaching and learning while keeping the students safe online.

Conclusion The globalization of education is increasing rapidly: Students attend courses from all over the world, employees work and study globally in multinational companies. The need to anticipate instructional process in an increasingly educational learning environment will also increase dramatically. Despite the importance of the flexibility for the instructional design, there can be observed a lack of research. Therefore, this simple idea responds to this need, it is about educational perspectives related to the acceptance and use of web-based learning environments. Education is a complex construct occurring at several educational levels and indicated through a variety of dimensions and variables. Therefore, the most critical issue seems to be the education-related flexibility for the design of web-based learning environments to reflect such a variety of intructional differences. But furthermore, it is necessary to improve the instructional sensitivity in designing and using online learning environments based on google media, because the collaborative nature of Google Apps for Education is a perfect fit for every educational institution where it allowing students to come together remotely to work on joint projects. Hopefully, google not only be a pure seach engine, but can be used for educators and students as an instructional media to be more competitive facing the globalization.

References
Collis, B., Vingerhoets, J. and Moonen, J. (1997). Flexibility as a key construct in European training: British Journal of Educational Technology 28 3, 199-218. http://googleenterprise.blogspot.com/2011/02/guest-post-google-docs-for-classroom.html Jin, L. and Cortazzi M. (1998). Dimensions of dialogue: large classes in China: International Journal of Educational Research 29, 739-761. Reeves, T. (1992) Effective dimensions of interactive learning systems in Proceedings of the Information Technology for Training and Education Conference (ITTE '92), University of Queensland, Brisbane, Australia.