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Georgetown Hoyas are going Google

miriam — Wed, 11 Jul 2012 16:02:00 +0000

Posted by Lisa Davis, CIO, Georgetown University

Editors note: Today's guest blogger is Lisa Davis, Chief Information Officer at Georgetown University.

Going Google was an opportunity to reimagine technology’s role at Georgetown and unify our campus by moving to a powerful cloud computing solution that worked no matter where our users were or what device they used. We had calendars, mail, and file storage and sharing tools before, but they were fragmented and in dire need of replacement. Our email system was twelve years old, only allowed 250MB per user, and calendars were not universally adopted or user-friendly. When our 16,000 students started using Google Apps for Education back in 2009, we instantly noticed some dramatic benefits. So we’ve decided to complete the migration by moving everyone over to the same platform. By summer’s end our 20,000 students, staff, and faculty members won’t have to worry about hitting email quota limits, guessing what teammates’ calendars look like, or being frustrated by the technology around them.

While modernizing our technology was one motivation, we also wanted to invest in a long-term vision of moving our university into the 21st century. Doing this in-house would have amounted to a tremendous resource commitment both now and in the future, for a relatively small boost in the end user experience. Google’s tools were an affordable way to provide a sustainable infrastructure for our faculty and staff.

The process of moving our users to Google was fast, painless, and will ultimately make our users more productive. We were really impressed with our community’s reception to the switch. It helped that about 30% of our staff and faculty already had personal Gmail accounts, but during our outreach events, even people without that exposure were excited to migrate. We did several demonstration events to answer questions, and provided hands on support for those who needed it.

Working on projects and tasks has become much less painful after switching to Google Apps because instead of dozens of versions attached to dozens of emails, we can all work on one copy at the same time through Google Docs. The Corp, the student-run corporation at Georgetown, uses Google Apps to coordinate schedules, plan events, and manage other aspects of the business. With our 4,000 faculty and staff now using Google Apps as well, we are excited to see the innovative uses the whole campus will find for collaboration, enhancing the education experience, and becoming more productive across campus.

We look forward to bidding farewell to the days of full inboxes, missed appointments, and inefficient technology. Going Google allows us to switch off our email servers and at the same time take a giant leap forward in the services we provide our employees and students.

Birds of a Feather Flocking Together: Google Apps Regional Groups

miriam — Wed, 07 Mar 2012 19:00:00 +0000

Posted by Jordan Pedraza, Google Apps for Education Community Manager

In 2010, Northwestern University, Brady Corporation, and Motorola Mobility came together as organizations using Google Apps for Education or Business to share best practices, showcase custom solutions with Apps Script and APIs, and discuss common issues. The initial meeting was so successful, these customers formed the Google Apps Northcentral User Group and organized several followup meetings for other regional enterprise and education Google Apps customers to connect with each other and share feedback directly with Google.

Since then, we’ve helped to launch additional Google Apps Regional Groups for colleges and universities, businesses, governments, non-profit organizations, and large K-12 school districts. We continue to hear more productive and cross-industry conversations, from Boise State and Genentech exchanging deployment tips in the Northwest Group, to SUNY IT and Ahold discussing migration best practices in the Northeast Group. And these discussions aren’t limited to talks about the transition to Google Apps; group members are also sharing creative and innovative uses of Google Apps: UNCG's Google Calendar mashup has inspired other organizations to adopt and customize Calendar with APIs more broadly for easier discovery of events.

We’ve already seen great communities with the K-12 user groups and now the trend continues for higher education, business, government, and non-profits. These regional groups join the existing K-12 user groups and are designed for Google Apps administrators and managers to network, learn, collaborate, and share resources through discussion forums, events, and webinars. While no industry is the same, we’ve heard from regional group members that it’s better to “flock together like birds of a feather” and share how they’re taking advantage of the tools and platform.

If you’re a Google Apps administrator and your organization is located in the United States or Canada, please check out the list below – as well as appsusersgroup.com – to find and join your group. International groups in Australia-New Zealand and Europe are also coming soon!

North America http://groups.google.com/a/appsusersgroup.com/group/northamerica
Mailing list for all regional groups in the US and Canada

Northwest http://northwest.appsusersgroup.com

US: Alaska, California, Hawaii, Idaho, Montana, Nevada, Oregon, Washington, Wyoming
Canada: Alberta, British Columbia, Northwest Territories, Saskatchewan, Yukon

Southwest http://southwest.appsusersgroup.com
Arizona, Colorado, New Mexico, Oklahoma, Texas, Utah

North Central http://northcentral.appsusersgroup.com
US: Iowa, Illinois, Indiana, Kansas, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, North Dakota, Nebraska, Ohio, South Dakota, Wisconsin
Canada: Manitoba, Ontario, Nunavut

Southeast http://southeast.appsusersgroup.com
Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee

Mid-Atlantic http://midatlantic.appsusersgroup.com
District of Columbia, Delaware, Maryland, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Virginia, West Virginia

Northeast http://northeast.appsusersgroup.com
US: Connecticut, Massachusetts, Maine, New Hampshire, New York, Rhode Island, Vermont
Canada: New Brunswick, Newfoundland & Labrador, Nova Scotia, Prince Edward Island, Quebec

Australia-New Zealand http://australia-newzealand.appsusersgroup.com
Australia and New Zealand

Europe http://europe.appsusersgroup.com *
Europe

* Update 3/22: Due to recent feedback from Google Apps customers in Europe, we have decided to roll our initial UK-Ireland and Spain user groups into a larger Europe Users Group. We will establish regional aliases in the near future. Thanks to anyone who has reached out to us or shared feedback.

Banana slugs move at the speed of Google

miriam — Fri, 18 Nov 2011 16:27:00 +0000

Posted by Obadiah Greenberg, Business Development Manager, Google Apps for Education

As a creative writing student at UC Santa Cruz in the early 90s, when I needed to write a story I’d trek across campus over wooden bridges suspended among the age-old redwood trees, down windy paths (avoiding banana slugs), and up to the computer lab. I’d insert a 3.5-inch floppy into the Macintosh SE, make my edits, then listen to the words rip across the dot matrix printer. I’d then carry the pages to the writing workshop where teachers and fellow students would scribble their edits and comments, generally with a red pen. Then it was back to the lab for another re-write.

Despite the fact that nearly every student has a computer these days – saving countless trips to the central computer lab – the way student teams worked together didn’t really become much more efficient, collaborative and fun until UCSC first moved to Google Apps for students in March 2010. And now, starting this week, faculty and staff are also adopting Google Apps so it will be even easier to draft and share work, provide input and incorporate feedback in realtime. Having a common platform for communication and collaboration for all members of the UCSC community means everyone’s literally on the same page.

Many other schools have also recently migrated to Google Apps for their staff and faculty community including Wake Forest University, Barnard College, George Washington University, ESSEC Business School, San Jose State University and many more.

If you’re interested in a deeper look at how staff and faculty at schools like these are using Apps to do things such as build ePortfolios in Sites and track committee minutes in Docs, register here to join our upcoming webinar on Wednesday December 7th at 10am PST. And in the meantime check out our whitepaper to read more about common questions and concerns we’ve heard from schools migrating their faculty and staff communities.

Announcing the 2012 Google Model Your Town Competition

miriam — Thu, 10 Nov 2011 22:00:00 +0000

Here at Google, we love getting to see what people create, and that's why we've launched our second Google Model Your Town Competition, open to people from all over the world.

Students have shown us in past competitions what they're capable of, and this time you can compete with the world community-at-large for a chance to help your town's local school district, and become a local hero.

By creating a 3D portrait of your community and sharing it with the world, you have the power to get your town on the map – and there's no bigger map than Google Earth. Show the planet what's special about your town by creating 3D models of the buildings in your community using either Google SketchUp or Google Building Maker and submit your entry by March 1, 2012. You can model as many structures as you like – which types of buildings you choose to include is entirely up to you. The important thing is that your choices say something about the character and history of your town.

Here's some inspiration by way of the 2010 winner, Jorge De Albertis, from Lima, Peru (just to get your creative juices flowing):

We can't wait to see what you create. Here's how to get started.

Posted by Allyson McDuffie, Google Geo EDU Team

Let freedom (from servers) ring: EDUCAUSE 2011

miriam — Wed, 26 Oct 2011 18:11:00 +0000

Posted by Tom Mills, Director of Education

(Cross-posted on the Official Google Blog)

This time last year, we were tailgating with the USC marching band at the EDUCAUSE conference—an annual gathering of the higher-education IT community. Last week, with more than 15 million people now actively using Google Apps for Education, we ventured to Philadelphia for a few jam-packed days at EDUCAUSE 2011. Our time in the city of brotherly love included a booth with 30+ Googlers and a woodsy backdrop for our fireside chat series; meeting with hundreds of CIOs from universities using and considering Google Apps for Education; a party at the Academy of Natural Sciences; and of course liberty and the lifelong pursuit of the Philly cheesesteak. Here’s a glimpse:

The Campus Computing Project released its annual report at EDUCAUSE, too. This year’s survey named Google as the leading provider of outsourced cloud-based campus email services. According to the survey, 89 percent of higher education institutions are either already using or considering switching to cloud-based solutions. Of four-year colleges and universities (including community colleges) that have already moved to the cloud, more than 56 percent have gone Google—including 64 percent of public universities and 66 percent of private universities.

Last month we shared that 61 of US News and World Report’s top 100 Universities are using Google Apps for Education. That number’s now up to 62, and is still just a snapshot of the thousands of institutions using Apps on campus. Schools that have recently selected Apps for Education as their collaboration platform include Harvard University, University of Texas at Austin, Wellesley College, University of Amsterdam, Stanford Graduate School of Business, University of York and University of Bristol.

In addition to these new schools, we’re also bringing some new integrations to Apps:

OpenClass: Pearson has developed a free cloud-based Learning Management System that is tightly integrated with Google Apps and provides a new kind of learning environment that stimulates social learning. This is available in the Apps Marketplace.
SlideRocket EDU: This presentation software integrated for cloud-based collaborative education enables you to unleash the creation, sharing and communication of ideas with an online application that connects with content in Google Apps for Education and is available on any device or browser. This is available in the Apps Marketplace.
Blackboard Bboogle: Last year, Northwestern University presented their popular Bboogle (Blackboard + Google) application at our EDUCAUSE booth. Bboogle has now been certified by Blackboard and is available to other universities as a Building Block through Blackboard’s Extensions website. Bboogle enables instructors to link Blackboard course sites directly to Google Docs, Calendars and Sites without requiring a second login. And by automatically setting permissions for editing, it helps encourage and facilitate collaborative instruction.
Desire2Learn: Users will soon be able to add widgets to Course Homepages that make it easy to view unread email messages in Gmail, keep track of upcoming events in Calendar, and submit assignments created in Docs.

If you weren’t able to join us in person at this year’s EDUCAUSE conference, you can check out some of our photos, and we’ll hope to see you next year.

Tradition meets technology: top universities using Apps for Education

miriam — Tue, 13 Sep 2011 15:01:00 +0000

Posted by Tom Mills, Director of Education

(Cross-posted on the Official Google Blog)

Pop quiz: What’s significant about the number 61?

(a) Number of points required to win a standard game of Cribbage

(b) The country code to call Australia

(c) Number of Top 100 universities that use Google Apps for Education

As all Aussie Cribbage enthusiasts attending college in the U.S. may suspect, this is actually a trick question—all three answers are correct!

Today, U.S. News and World Report released their 28th annual ranking of the top higher-education institutions across the nation. While this list of schools represents traditions of academic excellence that span centuries, these institutions also clearly recognize the importance (and value) of modern technology in academia. We’re thrilled that 61 of this year’s top 100 universities have chosen Google Apps for Education to help improve communication and collaboration on campus.

We’re proud to see such historic institutions moving to the world of 100% web. Here are just a few of the schools from this year’s “Top 100” that have gone Google:

Yale University
Northwestern University
Brown University
Vanderbilt University
University of Notre Dame
University of Southern California
Wake Forest University
William and Mary
Brandeis University
Case Western Reserve University
University of Maryland
Boston University
Rutgers University
Clemson University
University of Minnesota

To show our appreciation to these great schools, and to help students better explore and evaluate their college options, we’re providing a year’s worth of free access to the U.S. News complete rankings for anyone who registers before Friday, September 16. Just sign up and you’re all set.

Finally, it’s not just about who is using Google Apps. We’re also interested in how students and staff are using Google tools to do amazing things inside and outside the classroom. Since 61 is the magic number, we’ve compiled 61 stories directly from students, faculty and staff at these universities: www.google.com/apps/top100schools.

These 61 schools represent just a small portion of the 14 million students, faculty and staff now using Google Apps for Education. All over the world, Google Apps is helping schools offer their communities a better way of working together, and we’re honored to be a part of this new tradition.

North Carolina A&T State University goes Google

miriam — Fri, 19 Aug 2011 14:57:00 +0000

Posted by Wayne Kimball, Jr., Google HR Associate, NC A&T Class of 2011

Today’s Official Google Blog post highlights the vital role that Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) continue to play in the development of the African-American community, and demonstrates our ongoing commitment to ensuring these schools have the tools and resources they need to continue to blaze new trails and empower their students. As a recent grad from North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University (NC A&T), I found the relationship between Google and HBCUs to be especially meaningful.

As with all schools, Google provides HBCUs with free and powerful tools for teaching and learning that help students, staff and faculty be more efficient, productive and collaborative on campus. At last week’s HBCU Summit, it was exciting to see nine more HBCUs join the Google Apps for Education family—in addition to the other 13 HBCUs that are already using Apps on campus—including my own alma mater.

As last year’s president of the Student Government Association of NC A&T, I remember countless conversations with students about how they wanted to see a better email system. The students wanted more up-to-date and user-friendly features to help them work and communicate better with fellow students and faculty. When I sat with campus administrators to present the idea of upgrading to Google Apps for Education, I never realized how simple the task could actually be.

I’m proud to see my alma mater on the cutting edge of innovation as they move to Google Apps for Education. Making the switch to Google Apps will give the A&T community the convenience and mobility that it desires. Barbara Ellis, Vice Chancellor of Information Technology says, “At NC A&T, we are always looking for opportunities to enhance services to our students. Google Apps for Education brings our email implementation into the forefront and allows us to embrace a technology platform that is relevant to our student population. Our relationship with Google is one that we can continue to build on.”

I am elated to be a part of a company that gives back to universities like my alma mater, and I’m honored to be a graduate of an HBCU gone Google. I know firsthand that everyone at North Carolina A&T State University—the faculty, staff, administration, student body and alumni—welcomes progress, change and innovation. Today, we proudly welcome Google!

The NC A&T team with Googlers at the HBCU Summit

Save your friends from outdated email—help them switch to Gmail

miriam — Wed, 27 Jul 2011 21:07:00 +0000

Cross-posted on the Gmail Blog

I switched to Gmail the first month it came out, mere seconds after receiving an invitation from a friend and two years before joining Google. Since then, I’ve invited hundreds of people, most of whom have happily made the switch to Gmail and never looked back.

But I have one friend, Andy, who’s the straggler in the group. A couple months ago, I sent out an email about a barbecue I was having. On the “To:” line, there were 15 Gmail addresses and then Andy. He stuck out like a sore thumb. Shortly thereafter, Andy was complaining to us about how much spam he got. That was the last straw.

My friends and I sat Andy down and talked him through how to import his contacts. We answered his questions, guilt-tripped him a little, and a few painless minutes later we were done. Andy had Gmail.

We all have a story like this. On the Gmail team, we affectionately refer to them as “email interventions.” We hear about them all the time: the cousin who finally switched from an embarassing address like hottie6elliot1977 to a more professional elliot.d.smith@gmail.com, a co-worker who helped his dentist switch after he heard her grumble about having to pay for IMAP access, etc.

It’s for these folks we created emailintervention.com, a site that makes it easier than ever to help your friends and family make the switch.

Staging an intervention is simple:

Visit emailintervention.com
Sign in and automatically identify who from your contacts has yet to make the switch, or just enter a friend’s email address manually
Choose from one of three intervention message templates (“straightforward”, “concerned” or “ embarrassed”), and add your own intervention video if you’d like
Send a customized email and follow up as needed

Your loved ones are counting on you. Even if they don't know it yet.

Posted by Peter Harbison, Product Marketing Manager

UConn Goes Google: A Retrospective

miriam — Wed, 20 Jul 2011 14:45:00 +0000

Posted by John Collins, Sr. Global Trust Product Manager

In 1992, while I was an undergraduate at the University of Connecticut, some fellow students and I started an ambitious project to connect residence halls to the campus network and the Internet. After all, the web was just being created in ’92! At the time, our Lab Sciences House (Wright Hall, now gone... sniff... sniff) had a single mainframe terminal in what amounted to a large closet. The mainframe terminal was old, clunky, and not reliable or particularly useful. We wanted more.

The UConn administration bravely allowed my friends and I to design, deploy, and manage computer labs, networked dorm rooms, and most especially our own services. Personally I was really excited about our Gopher server*, but we also offered our classmates email, FTP, Usenet news, and a few shared applications like WordPerfect. In the 19 years since, campus technology has evolved – and so has UConn.

Today I’m especially proud to announce that my alma mater – UConn – is going Google. Associate Vice President and Chief Information Officer David Gilbertson says that the switch to Google Apps for Education stemmed from the recognition that students’ expectations about technology have changed dramatically in the past few years. This move to Apps will also bring significant benefits and cost savings to the University as a whole.

We Huskies were ahead of the curve in ’92, and we’re still at the cutting edge of campus technology today with our switch to Google Apps for Education. I know the UConn community will find amazing and innovative ways to exploit the tools Google is providing. And to all those students out there: even though you can’t knock on my door at 3am so I can fix the server anymore, rest assured the teams here at Google work 24 x 7 x 365 to make sure we’ll never be the excuse for your paper being late.

* Gopher was an early system for distributing, searching and retrieving information over the Internet. I thought it was really great that I could get National Weather Service forecasts for anywhere, whenever I wanted (you can still do this** via Gopher today!). Now though, I just ask my phone. Yep, the Internet has come a long way.

** Okay, that link is cheating – it’s using HTTP to get you to the gopher server – but chances are good your browser doesn’t even support the real Gopher.

Big(ger) mail on campus

miriam — Fri, 24 Jun 2011 15:24:00 +0000

Posted by Eric Edens, Apps Edu Team

Around here, our mantra is “think big.” That’s why when we first released Gmail on April 1, 2004 we offered 1GB of free storage—more than 100 times what most other free webmail services offered at the time. No wonder people thought it was an April Fool’s joke! So you can imagine the laughs when we launched Google Apps for Education in early 2006 with 2GB of email storage, which in some cases was hundreds of times more than what schools were traditionally offering their students and staff. We continued adding more storage, and today we offer over 7GB of free email space for everyone using Google Apps for Education.

Now it’s time to think bigger yet again. Starting next week, new schools that migrate to Google Apps for Education will see 25GB mailboxes. Existing customers will see their mailboxes grow over the course of the next few weeks.

To celebrate 25GB inboxes, we’d like to recognize 25 of the schools that have recently gone Google:

Amarillo College
Anaheim City School District
Ann Arbor Public Schools
Boston University
Buffalo State College
Chaminade University
College of Lake County
College of New Jersey
College of the Holy Cross
Corning Community College
Fall River Public Schools
Harvey Mudd College
HEC Paris
Instituto de Empresa Business School
Nebo School District
New Haven Unified School District
New York University, Stern School of Business
Oshkosh Area School District
Queen Anne’s County Public Schools
Spring Independent School District
University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science - Center Administration
University of Maryland in Baltimore
University of Northern Iowa
University of Salzburg
University of Richmond

We know students and teachers are really busy. There’s no reason they should spend their time sifting through spam and deleting email to stay under quota. We hope bigger inboxes might offer the first step to helping today’s students think bigger.

If you’re interested in bringing Google Apps to your school, let us know.

Managing a hectic schedule with Google Calendar’s appointment slots

miriam — Mon, 06 Jun 2011 19:43:00 +0000

Juggling a full schedule of classes, extracurricular activities, projects and office hours can make it especially difficult for students and teachers to manage an already full calendar. Luckily a new feature in Google Calendar called appointment slots is here to help.

Using appointment slots in Google Calendar you can indicate blocks of time on your calendar that can be scheduled by other people. Whether you’re a professor looking for a more manageable way to set up office hours, or a student juggling multiple group projects, appointment slots can help you to better manage your time and let others know when you’re free.

To start using appointment slots, just click anywhere on your Calendar, select Appointment Slots and fill in the details about what the the slots are for (i.e. Intro to Psych Class Presentations). You can set up as many slots as you’d like and only make appointment slots viewable by certain people.

If it’s a public event you can also direct people to the Calendar ‘s public appointment page URL, which can be found at the top of the appointment block details page. If it’s a private event you can invite specific guests.

Once you’re done filling in the details, just click Create Event, and voila...managing your time just became a whole lot easier.

The appointment slots feature is starting to roll it out widely today and should be available for everyone within the next few days.

Posted by Bernadette Shepherd, Google Calendar Team

The votes are in for the Google Science Fair Finalists and People’s Choice Award Winner

miriam — Mon, 23 May 2011 20:49:00 +0000

(Cross-posted on the Official Google and Science Fair blogs)

From winged keels to water turbines, from prosthetic limbs to programming in pure English, it’s been a fascinating two weeks for our Google Science Fair judges. It was no easy task to select 15 finalists out of the 60 semi-finalists—all of the students’ projects asked interesting questions, many focused on real-world problems and some produced groundbreaking science that challenged current conventions.

After much deliberation we're happy to announce the 15 finalists:

Age 13 - 14
Anand Srinivasan, USA
Daniel Arnold, USA
Lauren Hodge, USA
Luke Taylor, South Africa
Michelle Guo, USA

Age 15 - 16
Dora Chen, USA
Gavin Ovsak, USA
Harine Ravichandran, India
Naomi Shah, USA
Skanda Koppula, USA

Age 17 - 18
Christopher Neilsen, Canada
Matthew Morris, USA
Shaun Lim Hsien Yang, Singapore
Shree Bose, USA
Vighnesh Leonardo Shiv, USA

In July, these finalists will come to Google headquarters in Mountain View, Calif. to present their projects to our panel of finalist judges, including science luminaries, technology innovators and one Nobel laureate. They'll compete for prizes that include $100,000 in scholarship funds, real-life experiences at CERN, Google, LEGO and Scientific American, and a trip to the Galapagos Islands courtesy of National Geographic Expeditions. The winners will be announced at our celebration gala that same evening, beginning at 6:00 p.m. PDT July 11. The event will be streamed live on our YouTube channel so make sure to tune in.

In addition, over the past two weeks people around the world have had the opportunity to vote for their favorite projects in our online voting gallery. We have had over 100,000 votes and the competition was really tight, but we’re happy to announce that Nimal Subramanian is the People’s Choice Award winner. Nimal will receive a $10,000 scholarship. Congratulations Nimal—the public really loved your project!

Congratulations to all the finalists and the People’s Choice Award winner. We look forward to meeting the finalists at Google in July.

Posted by Samantha Peter, Education Team

Future female engineers come together in the Technovation Challenge

miriam — Tue, 17 May 2011 17:31:00 +0000

[Cross-posted from the Official Google Blog]

I was only 12 years old when I was introduced to BASIC, my first programming language, and it influenced my entire career path. Now working as a female engineer in a male-dominated industry, I recognize the importance of getting women interested in science and technology at a young age. In March, I decided to get involved as a mentor in the Technovation Challenge—an outreach program that gives high school girls a chance to explore computer science and engineering as well as grow their confidence and entrepreneurial skills while being guided by women mentors in the field.

The Technovation Challenge is a nine-week course for teams of high school girls to design a mobile app prototype, write a business plan and pitch their proposal to a panel of judges—which includes tech leaders and VCs—at one of many events held around the country.

One of the biggest obstacles in getting students involved in computing is the technical expertise that’s usually needed to program software. So I was excited to learn that App Inventor for Android, which makes it easy for anyone to create mobile apps for Android-powered devices, would be part of the Challenge this year. Rather than reading about CS, the girls were able to directly participate in engineering to quickly prototype mobile apps, without getting bogged down by the nitty-gritty of programming. Whether the girls were brainstorming ideas for their apps, fleshing out their business plans or hacking away at their prototypes, I was inspired by their creativity and determination.

A team of girls build their mobile prototype using Android App Inventor

At the regional pitch night in Mountain View in April, I was floored by not only my team’s presentations, but by all 50 girls competing. It was hard to believe that these confident young women—with their solid business plans and app prototypes—had joined the program just nine weeks ago with no background in entrepreneurship or programming. My team pitched a social education app—a chemistry-based game like Jeopardy! that students can play with friends in order to prepare for tests.

This Saturday, May 21, marks the culmination of the program, when the regional winners will convene on our Mountain View campus for the national pitch night. Here, they’ll compete to have their app professionally developed and distributed on the Android Marketplace by demoing their prototypes, presenting their business plans and ultimately convincing industry leaders that their startup is worth investing in.

The Technovation Challenge tackles the computing world’s gender gap head on, giving girls early exposure to tech in a fun, engaging environment that develops their skills and confidence. I’m proud to mentor high school girls interested in engineering and technology, and I hope their experience in this program today will inspire them to become the tech leaders of tomorrow.

Posted by Shubhie Panicker, Software Engineer and Technovation Challenge mentor

Exploring Space with Google

miriam — Mon, 16 May 2011 15:58:00 +0000

At Google, we’re never afraid to think big, and our mission to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful doesn't stop at our exosphere. The universe is full of information, and as we push the boundaries of exploration, our job will be to organize it and make it searchable.

It shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone out there that we have a passion for space. Google’s culture of innovation stems from our pioneering quest for knowledge; each one of us is empowered to think big, think differently, break the limits, and take intelligent risks. Googlers are scientists, engineers, technologists, space enthusiasts; I have yet to meet a Googler who didn’t share the spirit of exploration.

With our main campus less than a mile away from the NASA Ames Research Center, it seemed natural that our organizations should strike up a relationship and find ways to work together. Over the years, we have collaborated with our NASA colleagues on some amazing projects, and are very proud of the joint work and data sharing that have contributed to our incredible space products, such as Moon and Mars in Google Earth. Most importantly, the longstanding friendship between our organizations means we can use our skills to complement each other, and bring people together around the globe. Literally. When we say around the globe, we mean....around the globe. With an altitude of roughly 200 miles, and orbiting at about 17,500 miles per hour! (I crack myself up with my space jokes.)

In partnership with NASA, and PBS, YouTube and Google Moderator will pose your questions to the crew of STS-134, the final mission of the space Shuttle Endeavour, in a live interview emceed by stellar talent (another space joke!) Miles O'Brien.

To mark the occasion, we put together this video to celebrate our love for space, told with the help of products we pour our hearts into every day. You’ll see everything from historical sky maps featured in Google Earth, to 3D buildings at Kennedy Space Center, and our salute to both the astounding achievement of the Apollo era and the Google Lunar X PRIZE, a new space race of entrepreneurial leadership.

We hope you love the video as much as we do; it's our way of making space exploration open and accessible to everyone. Happy viewing, and keep exploring!

Posted by Tiffany Montague, Intergalactic Federation King Almighty and Commander of the Universe

Graduating with Google Apps

miriam — Thu, 12 May 2011 15:12:00 +0000

To those of you graduating from college this spring, congratulations! You’ve reached a big milestone. As you prepare for this new stage, we want to help you bring what you’ve learned in college with you out into the world.

If you attended a university that’s “gone Google” or just sought out Google products on your own, you’ve learned how to use Google Apps to collaborate and communicate with your professors and peers. Perhaps you’ve used Gmail to power through email efficiently, Docs to revise group projects without the hassle of attachments, Calendar to keep up with extracurriculars, forms to quickly collect and analyze data or Sites to organize resources around your projects. Using these tools has equipped you with valuable expertise for life after college—just like the finance skills you learned in your major or the Spanish language abilities you picked up while studying abroad.

With this in mind, we’ve created the Google Guides program to help you take your Google Apps expertise to your future job. When you become a Google Guide, we’ll equip you with resources to introduce and implement Apps in your workplace. You’ll make an immediate impact by saving your company money and facilitating collaboration among coworkers. Once your company is up and running with Google Apps, you’ll get to continue using all the Apps tools you learned and loved in college—not to mention be known as your company’s in-house Google expert.

If you’re not sure where you’ll be picking up your paycheck yet, don’t fret. The Google Guides program also provides tips and tools for your job search, including resume templates.

You’ve learned a lot in college, so take all of your knowledge and skills to your first job. Sign up as a Google Guide at google.com/apps/graduate and read our FAQs for more details.

Best of luck on whatever comes next!

Posted by Posted by Lauren Kolodny, Google Apps Marketing Manager

Celebrating Earth Day

miriam — Fri, 22 Apr 2011 16:58:00 +0000

[Cross-posted on the Official Google Blog]

Today, we’re celebrating Earth Day with an animated, interactive doodle on our homepage and events at Google offices around the world. At our headquarters in Mountain View, Calif., we’re holding an environmental fair for Googlers, complete with speakers and contests to strengthen Googlers’ green acumen, and a cookout using—what else—parabolic solar cookers (don’t worry, we’ll compost the leftovers).

Our campus gardens in Mountain View

We’ve been carbon neutral since 2007 and—Earth Day or not—we’re always asking ourselves what we can do to make the world greener today than it was yesterday. This week, we launched a new website with many of the questions we’ve been asking over the years that have inspired our environmental initiatives. What can we do to make renewable energy cheaper than coal? How can we run a data center using 50 percent less energy? And what does it take to green our energy supply?

It’s questions like these that led us to install solar panels on our Mountain View campus in 2007—at the time, the largest corporate solar installation in the U.S. They’re also what made us decide to donate to Googlers’ favorite charities based on how often they self-power their commute, whether by bike or by pogo stick. We hope the new website helps you start asking bold questions that lead to innovative solutions to make the world a greener place.

In addition to our new site, we’ve had a busy few weeks continuing our green streak. We doubled down on greening our energy supply with our second power purchase agreement (PPA) in less than a year and made several new investments: at a solar photovoltaic plant in Germany (our first in Europe), and others in the largest wind farm and solar project in the world, bringing our total invested in clean energy to more than $350 million. While the investments won’t supply our operations with energy, we believe they make business sense and will spur development and deployment of compelling clean energy technologies.

This Earth Day, we’ll continue to ask ourselves what else we can do to bring us closer to true sustainability. We hope that you, and companies across the world, will be doing the same.

Posted by Bill Weihl, Green Enegy Czar

Google Earth goes royal

miriam — Fri, 08 Apr 2011 19:20:00 +0000

For many college students, traveling to England to see the April 29 wedding of Britain’s Prince William to Kate Middleton may be just a little bit out of their price range... but don’t despair! If you’re a huge fan, but can’t attend the actual festivities, we may be able to help make it possible for you to be a virtual guest.

Enhanced Google Earth 3D imagery for the wedding procession route enables you to feel like you’re there! Full of iconic British landmarks, the wedding procession route starts at Westminster Abbey, goes past Parliament and Big Ben, and ends at Buckingham Palace:

If the Royal Wedding doesn't excite you, but modeling does, you might consider contributing to Google Earth’s offerings by using Google SketchUp and Google Building Maker. Find out more about Google Earth at earth.google.com.

Also, check out the official Royal Wedding website (built and hosted on Google's own computing infrastructure - Google App Engine) for updates before the big day.

Posted by Julia Chou, Account Manager

Google SketchUp in Higher Education

miriam — Sat, 02 Apr 2011 17:35:00 +0000

SketchUp has proven to be a very valuable tool to students and educators. Last year we showcased a few K12 schools who use SketchUp in interesting ways to do everything from creating models of their town buildings to designing furniture.

We now have a new video profiling how SketchUp is used in higher education. Take a look at three areas of study (film, interior design, and architecture) from three schools (Los Angeles Film School, Art Institute of Colorado, and University of Colorado) using SketchUp to advance the skills needed by students to enter the professional world after graduation:

Find out more about Google SketchUp at sketchup.google.com

Posted by Allyson McDuffie, SketchUp for Education Program Manager

College Basketball 2011: Over 50% of the bracket has gone Google

miriam — Thu, 17 Mar 2011 21:04:00 +0000

[Cross-posted on the Enterprise Blog]

March is a special time for college basketball enthusiasts as the NCAA® Championship games heat up. This season is especially exciting for us on the Apps for Education team to watch, as more than half of the teams in this year’s tournament have Gone Google – meaning they’re using Google Apps for Education on campus.

With more than 11 million students, faculty and staff who are already part of the Google Apps “squad” – providing their campus community with collaboration and communication tools – we’d like to congratulate the 37 Apps schools who are vying for the championship and wish them luck with the rest of the tournament, including:

Alabama State University
Belmont University
Bucknell University
Clemson University
Gonzaga University
Notre Dame
Old Dominion University
San Diego State University
Temple University
University of Akron
University of Arkansas at Little Rock
University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign
University of Kentucky
University of Nevada, Las Vegas
University of Texas at San Antonio
University of Southern California
University of Washington
Utah State University
Vanderbilt University
Villanova University

For information about how to become a 100% web campus, please visit google.com/apps/edu. While we’re sorry to say we can’t promise any success on the basketball court, you can at least make your own bracket a "slam dunk" with the Google Docs bracket template!

Posted by Steven Butschi, Google Apps for Education team (and college hoops enthusiast)

Future filmmakers, talk show hosts, sportscasters and media executives: a new school for you

miriam — Wed, 16 Mar 2011 18:00:00 +0000

The media world is changing: from how we produce, distribute and consume content to how we categorize different genres – from film to sports to news. Moreover, because of the insane number of megapixels on our phones, savvy friends, and online tools, everyone’s a content creator now - not just the major studios that you hear about on TV. Whether you're capturing your first film, producing your school's talk show, riding the side line commentary of the game, or "flip cam-ing" your friend's (most) embarrassing moment on a Friday night, you’re making content.

Often, many of us have greater aspirations to turn these content creation hobbies into careers –from being media executives to award-winning writers or actors. Some of us are given opportunities to hone our skills, but many of us aren’t. We may simply lack opportunities to explore our content aspirations or, if we already have exposure, may want to extend our skills even more. And even more often, a lot of us just don't know where to start.

To help nurture the world's next generation of leading creators, we've created the YouTube Creator Institute, a new school for all kinds of content creators. We’ve worked with some of the world’s leading film and television universities to put together this new series of media programs. Based both on YouTube and onsite at the campuses of our institutional partners, participants will learn from a unique new media curriculum, apply new media tools, find out how to build their audiences, be promoted globally on the YouTube platform, and engage with industry leaders and experts. Participants will learn everything from story arcing to cinematography, money-making strategies to social media tactics. The wider YouTube community will be able to learn along the way, too, by following the rise of the YouTube Creator Institute’s inaugural class on YouTube this summer. Oh, and it’s all paid for.

The inaugural YouTube Creator Institute programs begin in the United States in May this year.

The University of Southern California School of Cinematic Arts is the country’s first film school and regarded as one of the leading schools in the world, with an alumni base of industry leaders and an array of notable accolades. The YouTube-USC Creator Institute takes place from May 25 until June 22 in Los Angeles, CA.

Columbia College Chicago’s Television Department has been innovating around new online media strategies for years, with students creating award-winning web-isodes while investigating new opportunities in the online space. The YouTube-Columbia College Chicago Creator Institute begins on May 31 and ends on July 22 in Chicago, IL.

Any U.S. citizen over 18 is welcome to apply, and candidates may apply online at www.youtube.com/creatorinstitute from now until midnight on March 25. Applications include two short answer questions and a maximum two-minute demonstration of the creator’s craft, whether it be a short film, a clip of a personal cooking show, or a snapshot of a nature expedition (please make sure that you don’t exceed the 2 minute limit!). Afterwards, the YouTube community will vote for two weeks between March 29 and April 8 for their favorite creators. The top-voted candidates will move on to the final round, where our film and television school partners will choose the inaugural class for each of their programs, which will be announced on April 20 at youtube.com/creators. Learn more about the application and judging criteria.

Whatever kind of content creator you are, we welcome you to join us this summer! Apply now!

Posted by Bing Chen, YouTube Creator Initiatives and Product Marketing

Baseline to baseline, we’ve got the basketball games covered

miriam — Mon, 14 Mar 2011 19:06:00 +0000

Cross-posted on the Official Google Blog

Do you hear the dribble on the court and the chanting of the fans? Following an action-packed week of buzzer beaters, the 2011 NCAA® Championship here in the U.S. promises to be as exciting as ever.

As a college hoops fan, I often wish I could experience the games sitting in the arenas—and I’m sure I’m not alone. This year, our college basketball tournament map lets you get as close as you can to the games without leaving your desk thanks to 3D models of the tournament’s 14 arenas. Take a virtual tour of the venues by watching the video below, or download this tour and open it in Google Earth.

Plus, we’ve created a special page for you to keep track of all the excitement during the next few weeks. You can see an up-to-date tournament schedule, explore the college campuses in Street View and click through to watch the actual games on NCAA® March Madness on Demand®. You can also create a bracket using Google Docs, read Google News articles on the games and download basketball apps from the Chrome Web Store. It’s all here (along with a fun surprise) at www.google.com/collegebasketball2011.

And since there’s been a long-running debate over whether teams playing closer to their home court have an advantage, we added a “Distance Tool” on the map to make it easier to measure how far schools have to travel from game to game. We’ll see how things play out, but the defending champion Duke Blue Devils may have to travel more than 2,000 miles to Anaheim if they win their first two games.

As my friends always say when we can’t wait for the tournament to begin, “Send it in, Jerome!” May your favorite school reach the finals and we hope you enjoy all the basketball fun at www.google.com/collegebasketball2011.

Posted by Aaron Weissman, Google Maps Marketing (San Francisco King of the Rock winner)

Google Docs eases the pain of group work

miriam — Tue, 08 Mar 2011 20:45:00 +0000

Miles Malerba is a senior at the Rochester Institute of Technology and a Google Student Ambassador. In this post he writes about using Google Docs for group projects as a Software Engineering major. If you have a tip that you’d like to share and have featured on this blog, let us know!

As a Software Engineering student at the Rochester Institute of Technology, I do a lot of group projects. Luckily I recently discovered what a powerful tool Google Docs can be for group project work, and I’m not the only one who has noticed; the majority of students in my software engineering classes are also now using Google Docs for their group assignments. The collaborative features of Google Docs make working on an assignment with other people much easier and more efficient.

Before Google Docs, I did my group projects in a traditional desktop word processor, which was always a hassle. I’m sure you’re all familiar with the common scenarios that plague traditional group work: everyone standing around while one person types (frustrating and unpleasant for everyone), or dividing up the work so each member is responsible for a portion (great in theory, but problems abound with multiple versions, overlapping content and the one laggard who always finishes at the last minute).

Luckily, thanks to Google Docs, I don’t have these problems anymore.

I recently took a software requirements class and was given a group assignment to meet with an actual start up company that was interested in doing requirements analysis on the software they were developing. My group - of course - used Google Docs to help us coordinate. In our initial team meeting we set up a collection that was shared with all of the group members; this way any document we added to the collection could immediately be seen by everyone else in the group. After that we created outlines for all of the documents we needed and added them to the collection. We assigned each person a section to start working on and adjourned the meeting. Later that night when I went to work on my section I found that a few of the other group members were logged in too, working on their sections. As I worked on my section I encountered a few areas that needed to be clarified and so I just used the chat panel in Docs to ask my group what they thought. By the time I finished my section, I noticed everyone else had finished theirs too and I could immediately look over the document and make sure everything fit together. There was no emailing documents back and forth, everything just came together as we wrote it.

After completing the initial draft of the documents my group went to do an on-site meeting with the company. Only after reaching their office did we realize nobody had actually printed the documents to show them! After a brief moment of panic I realized that we did have our laptops and an internet connection. I jumped on to Google Docs, brought up the relevant documents, and shared them with the stakeholders in the meeting. We realized that this was actually a better way to do it, because we were all logged in and could take notes right on the document. The stakeholders could see us making notes based on their feedback so they knew we weren’t missing anything important. At the end of the meeting we told the stakeholders that should they come up with any additional feedback they could just add a comment right to the document and we’d take care of it.

For me this project was one of those moments where you realize just how much technology has changed the way you do things. Now that I use Google Docs I can’t imagine having to do a group project without it.

So whenever I wind up in a group that has never tried Docs before I insist that we try it, and we can stop using it if the group doesn’t like it; I’ve never been in a group that didn’t like it.

Posted by Miles Malerba, Rochester Institute of Technology

Join us on the bridge for International Women’s Day 2011

miriam — Thu, 24 Feb 2011 19:16:00 +0000

We are looking forward to celebrating women’s achievements and driving awareness of women's issues in honor of the 100th anniversary of International Women’s Day on March 8, 2011.

This year Google is collaborating with Women for Women International on their “Join me on the Bridge” campaign. Originally conceived of by women from Rwanda and Congo as a sign of solidarity between women in two conflict-ridden countries, last year’s campaign brought together thousands of women and men at more than 100 bridge events on four continents.

And this year we’re offering new online resources to make it simple for you, your friends and your classmates to participate in bridge events. To attend a bridge event, check our map to see all the events that have already been planned. Or you can use our event toolkit to plan your own event on the bridge of your choice.

Maybe consider organizing a bridge event on or near your campus. The event toolkit we've put together makes it super easy for campus women's organizations, sororities or other groups to plan an event using ready-made posters and t-shirt designs. And remember to take lots of videos and upload them to the map on March 8th!

On our International Women’s Day 2011 site, you can also donate to Women for Women International and more than 40 other incredible organizations working in the fields of women’s economic security, education, empowerment, equality, health and safety.

Hope to see you on the bridge on March 8!

Update 4:39PM: Added YouTube video.

Posted by Kate Hurowitz, International Women's Day team

Explore our U.S. Presidents on a map

miriam — Fri, 18 Feb 2011 13:30:00 +0000

[Cross-posted from the Official Google Blog and Google Lat Long blog]

When I was in elementary school, I got two days off every February; one for George Washington and another for Abraham Lincoln. I remember classrooms were usually wallpapered with a potpourri of decorations left over from Valentine’s Day and token silhouettes of these two Presidents thumb-tacked to the bulletin board. My teachers would talk about the significance of the holiday during class but with lack of visuals to pique my interest, it was always hard to retain (and fully enjoy!) the information. With that in mind, we’re pleased to celebrate the President’s Day holiday in the U.S. by letting you go back in time to learn more about our past presidents in a visually fun and interactive way.

We’ve created a U.S. Presidents Showcase to map the birthplaces of all 44 presidents, and provide details about their presidential terms, using the Google Earth plug-in. You can also see the states that voted during each president’s election by clicking on the tours in the left column of the showcase.

Whether you’re a history buff or simply curious to learn more about U.S. presidents, we hope you enjoy exploring a little further using Google Earth. In addition to the U.S. Presidents map, educators can use some of our other resources in their classroom to explore more aspects of history. Here are a few ideas:

Explore the White House, Washington Monument, Lincoln Memorial and other historical monuments in 3D and have students explain how architecture is used to honor people, concepts and establishments
View a 3D model of Valley Forge National Park in Google Earth
View a copy of the Emancipation Proclamation signed by Abraham Lincoln and map the areas where slavery ended, as well as the areas that were not initially covered by this executive order
Discuss the famous painting “Washington Crossing the Delaware” by German American artist Emanuel Gottlieb Leutze and use the ruler tool in Google Earth to measure the width of the Delaware River

We hope you have fun exploring and learning a little more of the history behind the President’s Day holiday. And when you’re done, go out and enjoy your day off!

Posted by Tina Ornduff, Geo Education Program Manager

Using my maps for your summer sublet

miriam — Wed, 16 Feb 2011 17:59:00 +0000

[Cross-posted from the Google Lat-Long Blog]

Katie is an Electrical and Computer Engineering student at University of Colorado, Boulder. She loves to use My Maps and her favorite map is one she created to keep track of her world travels, with all the countries she’s visited and a link to her Picasa Web Album for that trip. If you have a tip to share on this blog, let us know!

The spring semester ends, and the frenzy begins: Quick, everyone find someone to sublet your apartment for the summer!

Hundreds of students in your university town will be simultaneously advertising their apartments to potential summer subletters. How can you help your apartment stand out among the crowd? Bring in Google Maps to save the day. Google Maps has a feature known as My Maps, which enables you to quickly and easily build a personalized map highlighting the locations you care about -- all on one map! Simply share the map link with your family or friends to let them see it too.

Everyone knows that when looking for a summer sublet, it’s all about location, location, location. Where are the closest grocery stores? What’s fun to do nearby? There’s a running path along the creek just two blocks away? And the local bus picks up on the corner? Nothing sells these points better than an easy, personalized map.

It only takes minutes to create your own My Map. To start, sign in to your Google account and go to maps.google.com. Click on the link in the upper-left corner labeled “My Maps.” By clicking the “Create new map” link, you can pick a title and get to building your housing map.

To start finding locations of interest and placing them on your new My Map, search for those places in Google Maps, for example “park in boulder co.” After finding the location you are interested in, simply click on the red pin on the map, followed by the “Save to...” link. From here you can easily select the new My Map you created.

After adding a number of specific locations to your map, you can also customize and edit the map to fit your style preferences. To access your map thus far, click on the “My Maps” link in the top left corner of the page, and select the map you are interested in editing. By clicking the “Edit” button, you are now in editing mode on the map and can easily make changes to the names of locations or the style of icon. To make a change to a specific place, just click on that location. On the map, an editable box appears where you can easily make changes, such adding as some notes about the place.

The end product is a unique map showcasing why your sublet is the right option to pick. Here’s an example I used for an apartment in Boulder, Colorado.

Stand out in your next apartment rental posting with My Maps today!

Posted by Katie Corner, University of Colorado

Pin your love on the map

miriam — Mon, 14 Feb 2011 19:21:00 +0000

(Cross-posted from the Lat Long Blog)

This Valentine’s Day, tell your friends, family or significant other that you love them with a fun message from Google Maps.

Location can be a powerful trigger of memories—from the Italian place in San Francisco where you went on your first date to the cabin you rented at Lake Tahoe with your roommates. For that reason, we thought it would be great to create a Valentine’s Day card that’s tied to a specific location. As long as there’s a place that means something special to you and the ones you love, mapping your valentine is a great way to make Valentine’s Day a little more special.

One of my favorite memories is from a family trip we took to Eilat in Israel (check out my awesome fashion sense, I’m on the far left...), so I sent my parents this card:

I hope you'll take a moment to remind the people you love of the places you've shared with them. Visit www.mapyourvalentine.com to get started.

Happy Valentine's Day from Google!

Posted with love by Aaron Weissman, Google Maps & Earth Team

Announcing: Code Jam Africa & Arabia

miriam — Tue, 08 Feb 2011 20:16:00 +0000

Do you love solving complex problems? Do you code in your sleep? Are you a student at an African or Arabic university? Are you interested in internships at Google?

If so, Code Jam Africa & Arabia is for you!

Code Jam AA is a new coding competition for African and Arabic computer science students. It's your chance to try your skills against fellow coders and algorithmic whizzes! Google engineers have been hard at work developing a set of brainteasers designed to challenge your CS know-how. Think you can beat them? You might win a t-shirt or special prize pack. Interested in Google internships? Register now and let us know! Outstanding performance in Code Jam AA 2011 may be considered if you apply for an internship at our European Headquarters in Zurich, Switzerland.

If you want to spread the word at your local university, feel free to print and distribute this leaflet.

Important dates

Qualification Round: Thursday, February 17, 2011 at 12:00 UTC (noon GMT)
Online Final Round: Thursday, February 24, 2011 at 17:00 UTC (5:00 PM GMT)

Need even more coding? Ready to take on the world? Stay tuned for Google's global Code Jam 2011!

Posted by Noha Salem, University Programs Specialist

Explore museums and great works of art in the Google Art Project

miriam — Wed, 02 Feb 2011 22:50:00 +0000

Yesterday we announced the Art Project - a new site that lets you explore hundreds of artworks from 17 of the world’s most acclaimed art museums in extraordinary levels of detail, as well as take 360 degree tours of the museums using Street View technology. The combination of 1000+ artworks, from more than 400 artists, with Street View of the museums, creates a completely new way to discover art online.

The Street View technology allows you to take a virtual tour inside museums from 11 cities across the world -- including The Metropolitan Museum of Art and MoMA in New York, The State Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg, Tate Britain & The National Gallery in London, Museo Reina Sofia in Madrid, the Uffizi Gallery in Florence and Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam.

Each museum features a super high resolution image, which in combination with a custom built viewer, enables previously hard to-see elements of an artwork suddenly become clear—such as the tiny Latin couplet which appears in Hans Holbein the Younger’s ‘The Merchant Georg Gisze.’ The resolution, combined with the custom built viewer, enables you to discover minute aspects of paintings you may never have seen up close before, such as the miniaturized people in the river of El Greco’s ‘View of Toledo’, or individual dots in Seurat’s ‘Grandcamp, Evening’. Whether you’re an art newbie or an art history buff, you can browse the huge range of artwork in the project -- from Botticelli’s ‘Birth of Venus’ to Chris Ofili’s ‘No Woman, No Cry’, Cezanne’s post impressionist works to Byzantine iconography, ceilings of Versailles to ancient Egyptian temples.

Alongside the artwork in the info panel a whole host of information about a specific work of art can be found -- including viewing notes, artist biographies, audio tapes, and even links to Google Scholar search results. You can even watch YouTube videos while you’re exploring the brushstrokes of an artwork -- get a professional snowboarders’ perspective on an alpine landscape, or learn about the different locations of Rembrandt’s ‘Night Watch’.

With the “Create an Artwork Collection” feature, you can save specific views of any of the artworks and build your own personalized collection. Comments can be added to each painting and the whole collection can then be shared with friends, family -- or even collaborate with others on a joint collection.

I was lucky enough to study art from a very young age, and really hope that the Art Project inspires others to learn about and love art -- and visit the real thing!

A few example paintings:

The Dream, Henri Rousseau (MoMA, The Museum of Modern Art)

Officer and Laughing Girl, Johannes Vermeer (The Frick Collection, New York - USA)

Still Life with Flowers and Fruit, Paul Cézanne (Alte Nationalgalerie, Berlin - Germany)

The bedroom, Vincent van Gogh (Van Gogh Museum)

Uffizi Gallery in Florence, Italy -- with a view on Botticelli’s ‘The Birth of Venus’

Posted by Anna de Paula Hanika, Product Marketing Manager

Going Google: A Guide for Schools and Universities

miriam — Tue, 01 Feb 2011 17:25:00 +0000

We talk a lot about “going Google”, and with more schools and universities – like Ann Arbor Public Schools, Bryant University, Bucknell University, Henry Ford Community College, NYU, Oklahoma State University, and Southern Oregon University – migrating to Google Apps for Education every day, we want to help make it as easy (and fun) as possible to make the move.

Whether you are just thinking about launching Apps, or you’re toasting to your first graduating class after four years in the cloud – it’s always a good idea to educate your users about the new ways they can teach and learn with Google Apps. With that in mind, we’ve created the new Guide to Going Google which provides tools and resources that help students, faculty, staff and alumni make the most of your transition. The guide outlines six steps to successfully going Google: technical deployment, outreach, training, getting the word out, going live, and staying up to date. We designed this guide to be helpful for everyone from a 4th grade teacher in a classroom that’s just learning about Google Apps, to a university CIO that’s been using Apps for years.

Of course, if you’re still evaluating hosted collaboration tools for your school, and want to understand why so many schools have already gone Google, take a minute to hear what CIOs at Kent State, Brandeis, North Carolina State and U.C. Riverside are saying about making the move to Apps:

P.S. For those schools who have already gone Google, we'd love to hear and see your creative approaches to making the transition successful. Maybe you brought your mascot the a faculty training like they did at Brown University; or had a special group of on-the-ground trainers like the Creek Squad. Maybe you did something bold like NC State who created a graffiti wall to mark the occasion of your launch. Let us know how you’ve gone Google, so we can help other schools can get inspired, too.

Posted by Dana Nguyen and Miriam Schneider, Apps for Education team

Port your existing mobile number to Google Voice

miriam — Wed, 26 Jan 2011 17:05:00 +0000

867-5309 could be one of the most iconic phone numbers of all time, but it’s not the only number that a lot of us remember by heart. Many students have a phone number that they've shared with family, friends and contacts since junior high and are reluctant to let go.

One of the most frequent requests we hear from people who use (or want to use) Google Voice is that they’d like to get all of Google Voice’s features without having to give up their long-time phone numbers.

Today, we’re excited to announce that Number Porting is available for all existing Google Voice users. This means you can make the mobile number you’ve always used your Google Voice number, so it can ring any phone you want—or even your computer.

To get started with Number Porting, log in to your Google Voice account, visit the Settings page and click on “Change / Port” next to your Google Voice number.

Porting your number to Google Voice costs $20 and is usually completed within 24 hours. You may incur additional charges, including early termination fees, from your wireless carrier. Contact your carrier to get more details about the charges applicable to you.

After porting your number to Google Voice your mobile service plan will be cancelled, and there are a couple of steps that you’ll have to take to continue making and receiving calls on your mobile device. For more detailed instructions on how Number Porting works and to find tips for making the process as smooth as possible, visit the Google Voice Help Center.

Number Porting is currently available for existing Google Voice users and will become available to new users within the next few weeks, and at this time, Google Voice is available in the U.S. only.

Number Porting is currently available for existing users and will become available to new users within the next few weeks. At this time, Google Voice is available in the U.S. only.

Posted by Robert Dong, Software Engineer

CS4HS Grant Applications Now Open

miriam — Thu, 20 Jan 2011 22:00:00 +0000

For the fourth consecutive year, we’re funding the Computer Science for High School (CS4HS) program. CS4HS is a workshop for high school and middle school computer science teachers that introduces new and exciting concepts in computing and how to best teach them. The ultimate goal is to “train the trainer,” developing a thriving community of high school CS teachers who spread the word about the awe and beauty of computing.

In 2011 we’re looking to expand the program considerably, so have opened applications more widely to the public. If you’re a university, community college, or technical school in the U.S., Canada, Europe, Middle East or Africa and are interested in hosting a workshop at your institution, please visit www.cs4hs.com to submit an application for grant funding. The application page will be open between January 18, 2011 and February 18, 2011.

On our revamped CS4HS website you’ll find a slew of best practices, including ideas on how to organize a workshop, effectively recruiting teachers in your area and much more. In particular, we’ve shared a collection of CS4HS curriculum modules tried and tested at previous workshops that you can use and adapt in your own program.

Please stop by the CS4HS website to learn more about our program and submit an application for funding—and if you’re a student, tell your professors to apply!

We hope you’re as excited about the program as we are, and we can’t wait to see your workshop ideas come to life this summer.

Posted by Mary Radomile, Education Program Manager

Doodle 4 Google – Tell Us What You’d Like To Do Someday

miriam — Wed, 19 Jan 2011 14:36:00 +0000

(Cross-posted from the Official Google Blog)

Today, I’m pleased to announce the launch of the fourth annual Doodle 4 Google contest. Open to K-12 students in the U.S., Doodle 4 Google is an opportunity of a lifetime: design the Google.com homepage doodle for millions to see, and while you’re at it, take home a $15,000 scholarship and a $25,000 technology grant for your school.

In the spirit of thinking big, our theme this year is “What I’d like to do someday...” — giving all of the talented young dreamers an opportunity to flex their creative muscles. We know this crop of students will be the generation of tomorrow’s leaders and inventors, and we can’t wait to see what they come up with.

While most of this year's contest remains the same, we’ve made some exciting changes based on your feedback. Now, parents or guardians can register their students directly, and if a school registers, there’s no limit on the number of doodles they can submit. But remember, we only allow one entry per student. We’re also pleased to partner with Boys & Girls Clubs of America and Girl Scouts of the USA, two organizations that truly bring this year’s theme to life.

Once you’ve registered your students and they submit their artwork, Google employees and our panel of guest judges, including Whoopi Goldberg, gold medal ice skater Evan Lysacek and “Garfield” creator Jim Davis, will narrow down the submissions. The top 40 regional finalists will not only receive a trip to New York City and a visit from Google in their hometown, but their artwork will be featured in a special exhibition in partnership with the Whitney Museum of American Art.

For more details, check out google.com/doodle4google, including full contest rules. To get started, whether you’re a teacher or a parent, register your student(s) by March 2, 2011. Then get out the crayons, paints and markers—you can even throw your own doodle party. Please note that all entries must be postmarked by March 16, 2011.

Happy doodling!

Posted by Posted by Marissa Mayer, VP, Consumer Products

Google TV on Campus

miriam — Wed, 19 Jan 2011 00:13:00 +0000

(Cross-posted on the Google TV Blog)

Google TV has been popping up on college campuses across the country. We’re coordinating with the Google Student Ambassador Program and University Programs to share Google TV with students and faculty.

This initiative began last semester when Google Student Ambassadors hosted Google TV study breaks on over thirty campuses. The ambassadors had students compete to win Sony Internet TVs for their friends and school. They hosted pizza breaks, tech challenges, YouTube marathons and of course, college football viewing parties. The top seven most creative study breaks won two Sony Internet TVs to give back to their college as a reward for their school spirit and enthusiasm for Google TV.

The momentum from the Google TV study breaks has carried over into the classroom. Already, the web on TV has proven itself as a great platform for for early education and reading skills with web apps like PBS Kids and Meegenius. However, professors have expressed interest in expanding these opportunities to all levels of learning.

That is why we are announcing Google TV for EDU, a seeding program to support university research. Google TV for EDU asks campuses around the country: how can educators enhance the Web on TV for the classroom. Specifically, we’re asking faculty how their research could:

Generate new interest in television engineering
Make computer science tangible for students
Help in the development of smart TV curricula and new educational tools
Contribute to in-classroom and distance learning over television
Reach a wide audience

We officially launched the program yesterday to select university faculty with experience and leadership in television. These select faculty will receive a Logitech Revue to carry out their research in the classroom. Over the next few months we’ll be posting outcomes of their research as well as information on new educational web-apps.

Posted by Miriam Schneider, Product Marketing Manager

Student Tip: Using Google Calendar for Student Groups

miriam — Thu, 13 Jan 2011 21:39:00 +0000

Paula is a Senior at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, double-majoring in marketing and management. Here she shares how several student organizations she works with, such as American Marketing Association and International Impact, have utilized Google Calendar to manage scheduling. If you have a tip to share on this blog, let us know!

Like most outgoing students on today’s college campuses, I’m sure you’re involved with several student organizations. You probably even serve on a few executive boards or college councils. With this increased involvement, students need a way to organize their busy schedules and prioritize their time among several responsibilities. The solution – Google Calendar!

Google Calendar is so valuable for student organizations such as student senate, service clubs, sororities and fraternities, and sports teams because you can easily create a single calendar to share with all of your group members. This calendar can be accessed any time (from any device) and can be added to members’ personal Google Calendars. This will ensure that members always have the most up-to-date information about meetings, events, and more.

Google Calendars can also be embedded on your student organization’s website using the Calendar Address in Settings. Executive board members of your student organizations can also have access so that they can make changes to the calendar. That way, student members know if there is a cancelled meeting or event location change, without receiving mass emails. Trust me, I know a thing or two about getting too many emails, too!

The benefits of using Google Calendar for student organizations really revolve around the student members. In my experience, serving on two executive boards last semester, using Google Calendar has made it easier for members to keep up with meetings and stay involved. And better informed members equals more successful student organizations. So happy scheduling!

Posted by Paula Guzman, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Google Science Fair seeks budding Einsteins and Curies

miriam — Mon, 10 Jan 2011 23:17:00 +0000

(Cross-posted on the Official Google Blog, Google Docs Blog, and Google LatLong Blog)

Are you a student who loves science? Do you have a good idea for an experiment that you’d like to share with the world? In 1996, two young computer science students, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, had a hypothesis that there was a better way to find information on the web. They did their research, tested their theories and built a search engine which (eventually) changed the way people found information online. Larry and Sergey were fortunate to be able to get their idea in front of lots of people. But how many ideas are lost because people don’t have the right forum for their talents to be discovered? We believe that science can change the world—and one way to encourage that is to celebrate and champion young scientific talent as we do athletes and pop idols.

To help make today’s young scientists the rock stars of tomorrow, in partnership with CERN, The LEGO Group, National Geographic and Scientific American, we’re introducing the first global online science competition: the Google Science Fair. It’s open to students around the world who are between the ages of 13-18. All you need is access to a computer, the Internet and a web browser.

You may have participated in local or regional science fairs where you had to be in the same physical space to compete with kids in your area. Now any student with an idea can participate from anywhere, and share their idea with the world. You build and submit your project—either by yourself or in a team of up to three—entirely online. Students in India (or Israel or Ireland) will be able to compete with students in Canada (or Cambodia or Costa Rica) for prizes including once-in-a-lifetime experiences (like a trip to the Galapagos Islands with a National Geographic Explorer), scholarships and real-life work opportunities (like a five-day trip to CERN in Switzerland). And if you’re entering a science fair locally, please feel free to post that project online with Google Science Fair, too!

To enter, register online and create your project as a Google Site. Registration is open through April 4, 2011. Please note: you must get parental or guardian consent in order to compete. You can check out the complete rules here. After April 4, we’ll begin judging and will announce our semi-finalists in early May.

The semi-finalist projects will be posted on our online gallery, where we’ll encourage the public to vote for a “people’s choice” winner. From our list of semi-finalists, we’ll select 15 finalists to bring their projects to Google headquarters on July 11 to compete in our final, live event, where world-renowned science judges will select a winner in each age category, as well as a grand-prize winner.

Here's an example of a great science fair project site to inspire you. We asked Tesca, a U.S. high school senior from Oregon, to create it for us based on an award-winning project she’s been working on for years. Tesca’s objective is to make hospitals more efficient using artificial intelligence—a world-changing goal, to be sure.

So if you think you're the next Albert Einstein, Marie Curie—or Larry Page or Sergey Brin—sign up today for the Google Science Fair. Prove once again how science can change the world!

Posted by Cristin Frodella and Samantha Peter, Education Product Marketing Managers

Introducing the Google Science Fair!

miriam — Mon, 10 Jan 2011 19:50:00 +0000

(Cross-posted on the Google Docs blog)

Are you a 13-18 year old who loves science? If you are or know someone who is, you’ll be psyched to know that Google is announcing the first ever global online science competition, the Google Science Fair, tomorrow, Tuesday January 11th.

To celebrate our launch, we’re hosting a live event on youtube.com/googlesciencefair tomorrow, on January 11th at 9am EST. Tune in to get details about how you can submit your own project online and be inspired by some famous scientists so you'll be ready to prove you're the next Albert Einstein, Marie Curie or Dean Kamen.

Posted by Cristin Frodella, Senior Product Marketing Manager, Education

What do you want to hear about in 2011?

miriam — Wed, 05 Jan 2011 23:07:00 +0000

As you get back into the swing of school again after what we hope was a nice and restful holiday break, we'd love to know what you want to see from this blog in 2011. We enjoyed sharing all kinds of product launches, program announcements, and fun news with you guys last year and now we want to know what you hope to see done differently for next year.

So please let us know what would help you get the most out of the Google for Students blog by leaving a comment on this post.

Thanks for reading in 2010 and here's to more good things to come this year and beyond!

Posted by Google Student Blog Team

How to change the screensaver on a Mac

miriam — Fri, 24 Dec 2010 15:30:00 +0000

This post is the last edition of the “Teach Your Parents Tech” series where Googlers help provide some tips and tricks you can gift your parents with this Holiday Season.

Like most people, I look forward to going home for the holidays and enjoying the good food, good company and much needed rest and relaxation. But as the techie in the family (read: I know what the control panel does), I also look forward to setting my parents up with whichever ‘cool’ technologies the evening news happened to mention since the last time I was home. This year I’m guessing I’ll be opening up a Twitter account for Dad and downloading Angry Birds for Mom.

Any time I go home though, I also try to teach them something they’ll be able to do themselves later on. This time, I’m going to show my parents how to change a screensaver on a Mac. Of course, first I’ll have to explain to them what the screensaver is. Here's how I imagine this conversation going:

Me: Want to see how to change your screensaver?

Mom: Sure... what’s a screensaver?

Me: That program on your computer that shows pictures of the family when you’re away.

Mom: Why does my computer show pictures of us when I’m away?

Dad: Computers get lonely, too.

(My dad is the comedian in the family, clearly.)

So instead of going through all that, I decided I’d just make this video instead. A bunch of my friends made videos, too, which you've probably seen over the last few weeks. We figured if we use Youtube to cover the computer stuff, you’ll have more time to play snow football. Of course, you might still have to teach your parents how to watch Youtube videos...

Hopefully you and your parents will find value in these videos, and Happy Holidays!

My mom, dad and brother and me circa when plastic glasses frames were cool the first time.

Posted by Gopal Shah, SketchUp Marketing

Spell “oscilloscope” perfectly

miriam — Thu, 23 Dec 2010 15:30:00 +0000

This post is part of the “Teach Your Parents Tech” series where Googlers help provide some tips and tricks you can gift your parents with this Holiday Season.

In my video for my family, I demo a quick way to get the correct spelling of a word. Instead of using a spell checker or a physical dictionary (so 90’s), you can use familiar Google Search to learn whether to write “sharlaton” or “charlatan,” for example.

This trick even works when communicating with relatives who speak a different language. When I want to wish my mom’s Swiss family and friends a happy new year, I can type “es guetes Nöis” into the Google Switzerland search bar. Google returns the correct spelling “es guets Nöis”, scoring me kudos with the family until the next year’s holidays.

My mom, brother, and me wearing our fashionable holiday finest

Posted by Nathalie Arbel, Local Marketing

Giving the Gift of Email

miriam — Wed, 22 Dec 2010 15:30:00 +0000

This post is part of the “Teach Your Parents Tech” series where Googlers help provide some tips and tricks you can gift your parents with this Holiday Season.

When I go home for the holidays, I usually brace myself for a couple things: cold weather, fighting over the remote with my sister, and the shocking state of my parents’ overflowing email inboxes. Last year my mom asked me how I kept track of it all, and I gave her her favorite Christmas gift yet: teaching her how to start fresh with a new email address.

Maybe, like my dad, you created your email address 15 years ago when your family first got dial-up internet, and it’s time for an update. Or maybe you’ve been hearing your kids brag about a cool email service provider that you’d like to try out. Regardless of why you want to switch, a new email address is a great way to start the new year off with a clean slate and a clean inbox.

If you ask my mom why she switched to Gmail, she might say that she likes using labels to organize her inbox, or that she can archive messages without actually deleting them. But really, I think it’s because after the holidays are over and my sister and I head back across the country, she can chat with us through Gmail whenever she wants. Just ask her what her new favorite emoticon is (hint: it’s the heart! <3).

My mom, sister, me, and dad, reveling in the glory of the 90s.

Posted by Lauren Barbato, Online Sales

How to transfer naked baby photos to your mom’s computer

miriam — Tue, 21 Dec 2010 15:39:00 +0000

This post is part of the “Teach Your Parents Tech” series where Googlers help provide some tips and tricks you can gift your parents with this Holiday Season.

Sharing photos, documents, video and other files with my family is something I frequently do around the holidays. In particular, I find myself sharing photos of my recent adventures and happenings with my parents.

My Dad is a big photography buff and tech geek (Love you, Dad :) ). Growing up, he always had a nice camera draped around his neck and recently he digitized (scanned) our thousands of family photos and put them onto the home computer. So, we have a stockpile of photos of my basketball games, my sister’s horse shows, naked baby bubble baths, easter egg hunts, trips to the beach, etc.

My Mom is not a tech geek. Recently she told me that she has heard of copy and paste, but doesn’t know how to use it. I recently taught her how to text message and my sister taught her how to book airfare online. However, my mom loves to look at family photos. The easiest way I’ve found to trasnfer photos onto my mom’s computer is by using a USB stick. I hope with the following video, I’ll be able to teach my mom how to transfer photos at any time:

For more videos of Googlers teaching their parents tech, check out TeachParentsTech.org.

My mom, me, and dad near Lake Tahoe, CA many summers ago.

Posted by Will Patrick, Enterprise Marketing Team

Holiday tips for Google Calendar

miriam — Mon, 20 Dec 2010 20:00:00 +0000

The end of the year is such an exciting time – classes are just about over and the holidays are coming. But things can also be a little stressful while you’re wrapping things up. Whether you need to schedule time to study for all your exams or just need to remember to buy a gift for your grandma, here are some Google Calendar features that will help make your life easier for the remainder of 2010.

1. Tasks

Have a lot to remember? Make a to-do list! Activate tasks by clicking the Tasks calendar listed under My calendars. You’ll see the Tasks pane expand on the right. Attach a due date to an existing task by clicking the right arrow next to the task, then clicking on the calendar icon to select a date.

2. Event time zones

This new feature is great if you're traveling for the holidays. Use it to plan events in whatever time zone you’ll be in, or even schedule flights with different departure and arrival time zones.

3. SMS notifications

Get event reminders on the go by setting up SMS notifications. After registering your mobile phone, set SMS reminders for individual events within the event page, or create default SMS notifications so you won’t miss a thing.

4. Quick Add

If you’re really in a hurry, use Quick Add to create events on your calendar. Just click the Quick Add link and type the details of your event (like "Study group at 6PM tomorrow in Gilchrist Hall") and Quick Add will pop the event on your calendar.

5. Background image

This one’s just for fun! Change your calendar background to something festive by first enabling the Lab, and then going to Calendar settings to choose your image.

Get started using Google Calendar to make your life easier over these next few weeks, or check out our Getting Started Guide to learn more. Happy holidays!

Posted by Alice Brown, Google Calendar Team

Copying and pasting – not as ubiquitous as you think

miriam — Mon, 20 Dec 2010 16:03:00 +0000

This post is part of the “Teach Your Parents Tech” series where Googlers help provide some tips and tricks you can gift your parents with this Holiday Season.

Copying and pasting definitely would have come in handy back in 1996 when I was typing out college application after college application, one by one, on my (at the time) super sophisticated word processor. Thankfully, my mother split the process up with me and helped me crank out 6 neatly typed applications, with minimal need for White Out.

Fast forward to 2010. I was at home chatting with my mom as she filled out an offer for one of her clients (she’s a real estate agent), when I noticed that she was typing each of her clients’ names, letter by letter, over and over again throughout the form.

And that’s the moment that copying and pasting forever changed her life.

Posted by Michael Bolognino, Product Marketing Manager

Searching for the sunshine and snow

miriam — Fri, 17 Dec 2010 15:45:00 +0000

This post is part of the “Teach Your Parents Tech” series where Googlers help provide some tips and tricks you can gift your parents with this Holiday Season.

In the town where I grew up, the average temperature fluctuates from 66°F to 83°F. I remember the weather guy on the local news spending more time telling funny stories than sharing the weather forecast. It wasn’t until I moved away for college, where clear skies could give way to thunderstorms in just minutes, that I learned the real value of quick access to a weather report. That’s also when I taught my mom how to check the weather report right from Google for any location in the world. By just typing “weather 08544” she could easily decide whether or not to call and remind me to bundle up.

Looking at the weather forecast is a great way to stir up nostalgia, prepare for a vacation, or decide what to wear in the morning. Whether you’re hoping for sunshine or snow, cross your fingers and head over to Google.com to search for the weather.

Before I knew why weather forecasts exist

Posted by Laura Melahn, Product Marketing Manager

Find a great place to eat in the neighborhood

miriam — Thu, 16 Dec 2010 15:30:00 +0000

This post is part of the “Teach Your Parents Tech” series where Googlers help provide some tips and tricks you can gift your parents with this Holiday Season.

For my mom, learning new technology can be pretty overwhelming. Except, of course, when that new technology makes her life easier in a very direct way. (The shopping center really didn’t know what hit it when she got a hold of a bar code scanning app on her mobile phone.)

Since my mom’s a big-time foodie, I thought it’d be perfect to show her how to find great local restaurants using Google Search.

Who knows? Maybe if she finds one she likes, she’ll feel inspired to take her darling son out for a bite to eat (hint, hint, Mom). If you’d like to get more quick videos to help your parents use technology in their everyday lives, check out www.TeachParentsTech.org.

My parents and I at a theme park around 1996. Any guesses as to who was most excited to be there?

Posted by Miles Johnson, Search Marketing Team

Letting everyone do great things with App Inventor

miriam — Wed, 15 Dec 2010 16:13:00 +0000

Cross-posted from the Research Blog

In July, we announced App Inventor for Android, a Google Labs experiment that makes it easier for people to access the capabilities of their Android phone and create apps for their personal use. We were delighted (and honestly a bit overwhelmed!) by the interest that our announcement generated. We were even more delighted to hear the stories of what you were doing with App Inventor. All sorts of people (teachers and students, parents and kids, programming hobbyists and programming newbies) were building Android apps that perfectly fit their needs.

For example, we’ve heard of people building vocabulary apps for their children, SMS broadcasting apps for their community events, apps that track their favorite public transportation routes and—our favorite—a marriage proposal app.

We are so impressed with the great things people have done with App Inventor, we want to allow more people the opportunity to do great things. So we’re excited to announce that App Inventor (beta) is now available in Labs to anyone with a Google account. To see App Inventor in action, check out this video:

Visit the App Inventor home page to get set up and start building your first app. And be sure to share your App Inventor story on the App Inventor user forum. Maybe this holiday season you can make a new kind of homemade gift—an app perfectly designed for the recipient’s needs!

Posted by Karen Parker, App Inventor Program Manager

Your desktop background is your palate

miriam — Wed, 15 Dec 2010 15:45:00 +0000

This post is part of the “Teach Your Parents Tech” series where Googlers help provide some tips and tricks you can gift your parents with this Holiday Season.

Last holiday season was the first time that I accumulated enough funds (read: got a “real job” and stopped living on my mother’s account) to purchase a substantial holiday present for the person who gave me life. The gift? A new laptop to replace her archaic machine from the Ninth Circle. Simply gifting someone else’s creation wasn’t enough, though--I wanted to personalize the experience.

My mother’s a hopeless sap: all of her online passwords are variations of her children’s names (please don’t hack her!); she can never find anything in her purse because it’s engorged by our baby pictures; and her visceral reaction to the question “how are you doing?” is “oh, they (my sister and I) are doing quite well!” So to personalize the laptop, my sister engaged her masterful design skills to produce a desktop background of my mother’s Two Wonders of the World: her daughter and son, with a mint green background, no less (her favorite color). When the day arrived, she ecstatically expressed her appreciation for “a real present...finally!”; the real ringer, however, came when she saw the illuminated screen. She was brought to tears.

Your desktop background is more than the tone with which you begin your computing experience; it’s your palate. Make it dynamic and fun, but most importantly, make it you.

I constantly change my desktop background. Here are a few instances:

Commemorate an important event or holiday, like a birthday or a national day
Promote or anticipate a major upcoming event, like a new movie or sports event
Rectify a bad day (or week) with a motivational quote or inspirational figures (a silhouette of Martin Luther King Jr. is a personal favorite)
Demonstrate loyalty to “your side” if you’re part of a rivalry--from sports teams to mobile phone operating systems (e.g. I’ve had an Android army robot before)
Mirror seasonal or environmental changes, such as a snowy background for the holidays or a beach during the summer

My mother and I, when I still listened to her attentively

Posted by Bing Chen, YouTube Partnerships and Platform Marketing

Email delegation now for all customers

miriam — Wed, 15 Dec 2010 00:53:00 +0000

A while back, we launched email delegation for customers using Google Apps for Business. Today, we're happy to bring this highly-requested feature to Google Apps and Google Apps for Education customers as well. As more universities migrate their faculty and staff to Google Apps, this feature will be particularly useful to schools as it allows administrative support staff to screen and send email on behalf of others who assign them as delegates. To enable this feature for your domain, select the Mail Delegation checkbox under Email Settings in the control panel.

With businesses and schools continuing the rapid move to the cloud, we are committed to continually releasing features like this that help streamline migration and constantly enrich the Google Apps experience.

Posted by Hari Nidumolu, Software Engineer

Find results at the right reading level

miriam — Tue, 14 Dec 2010 19:59:00 +0000

You may have had the experience while searching on Google of finding results that are either too simple or too complex for the task at hand. A new feature in Advanced Search lets you display the reading level of results and filter based on level.

To use the new feature, click “Advanced search” next to the search box and make a selection under “Reading level.”

If you choose to “annotate results with reading levels,” you’ll start seeing a handy bar graph showing the range of content for a particular topic at the top of the results page. This way whether you’re looking for a basic explanation of the [physics of frisbees] for your first science fair project, or you’re designing radical new saucers as part of your college aerospace class, Google can help you find just the right results.

By choosing “show only basic results” or “show only advanced results” you can sometimes find those needle-in-a-haystack pages that speak your language. For example, most results for [newtonian physics] are clearly for specialists in the field, but narrow that to the Basic reading level (hint: click on the “Basic” bar chart label), and you might just find something that actually makes sense. This can be particularly help for people who are learning English as a second language.

On the other hand, if you’re doing serious research on a topic with a lot of fluffy content online (eg: puppies), you can use the reading level tool to cut through to the more learned and interesting results. Who knew there was a scholarly journal of pop culture?

The reading level tool might even help you choose a research topic for your next project. Many searches return results that are on one extreme or the other: a lot of rudimentary information or a bunch of pages intended for Ph.D’s. With reading level information, you can get a sense of how much content has been published to the web at an appropriate level.

Posted by Noah Coccaro, Software Engineer

Searching for the right movie

miriam — Tue, 14 Dec 2010 15:47:00 +0000

This post is part of the “Teach Your Parents Tech” series where Googlers help provide some tips and tricks you can gift your parents with this Holiday Season.

When I head home for the holidays, I most look forward to seeing my family and labradoodles. I know I’ll also be catching up on sleep, reading, and seeing some new movies. While picking up Jane Austen will be an easy decision, figuring out which movies to see will be a tougher choice. My brothers, parents and I will have the inevitable debate between low-brow humor and action options.

When I was home for Thanksgiving, we decided on a movie we wanted to see, only to research showtimes and find that the time didn’t work for everyone. To help your families make the movie selection process easier, I’m sharing some guidance on how you can easily find movie listings and showtimes by searching on Google.com.

While we know this won’t solve all of the comedy versus action movie debates, we hope this will help you find some great movies to watch with your family over the holidays. To see more videos on easy ways to help your parents with technology, visit www.TeachParentsTech.org.

When the only movies I watched were cartoons

Posted by Katie Mandel, Product Marketing Manager, Google Maps

Teaching your parents tech

miriam — Mon, 13 Dec 2010 17:30:00 +0000

This post is the first in a new series especially for the Holidays around taking technology home with you this year. Stay tuned for more tips for the next ten days and check out http://teachparentstech.org to learn more.

We all know that coming home for the holidays can hold some serious responsibilities for students. Not only are you required to eat a lot, open gifts, and rejoice in some well-deserved time off from studying, but sometimes you’re also expected to serve as the in-house tech support team for your own family. Did you get your mom a new camera? Then you better get ready to teach her how to get the photos she takes from this little thing (camera) onto that bigger thing (computer).

This task is the motivation behind our recently launched campaign to “Teach Parents Tech”. Instead of spending hours trying to explain to your parents what a blog or browser is, wouldn’t it be easier to use this nifty website to send your parents (or grandparents, aunts, uncles, siblings...) a few tutorial videos that can teach them everything they’ve ever wanted to know about how they can use Google tools and products just like you do?

A bunch of us Googlers often have the same problem, which is why we actually filmed these videos for our own parents. For me personally, I chose to teach my dad how he can use a URL shortener (like goo.gl) to keep things short and simple. Just like his long-winded phone calls, he has a tendency to use Gmail chat and text messages (which he only refers to as “SMSes”, by the way) as if they are full-fledged conversations. My gift to him – and myself – this holiday season is to try and teach him how he can simplify his messages and his URLs.

With all the holiday countdowns this time of year (like the 8 days of Hanukkah, 12 days of Christmas, or 7 candles for Kwanzaa) we thought it would make sense to post one of these every day on the Student blog for the next ten days. We hope you (and your parents) find them useful.

A shorter version of me and my and dad circa 1987

Posted by Miriam Schneider, Google Apps for Education team

Celebrating the Second Computer Science Education Week

miriam — Thu, 09 Dec 2010 23:25:00 +0000

Cross-posted on the Official Google Blog

This week we celebrate and recognize the second annual Computer Science Education Week (December 5-11). We’re proud to continue our support for CSEd Week and our commitment to Computer Science education.

We believe that all students should have the opportunity to become active creators of tomorrow's technology. With that in mind, our goal is to use Google’s strengths and infrastructure to increase access to high-quality open educational content and technology in order to invest in the next generation of computer scientists and engineers. Here are a few programs we worked on in 2010 to expand the reach and quality of computing in education:

Implementing new education technologies and tools that scale
In July, we introduced App Inventor in Google Labs, a web-based environment that allows students with no computer programming knowledge to build apps for their Android phone. Rather than writing syntax, students design the app and then piece together puzzle-like blocks to set the app’s behavior. Educators around the world have found App Inventor to be a powerful platform for introducing students to the high-level concepts of computer programming and the world of technology.
Increasing access to and the quality of computing curriculum
In October, we released a set of classroom-ready lessons and examples—created by teachers in collaboration with Google engineers—showing how educators can incorporate computational thinking into K-12 curriculum for math and science. Computational thinking is a set of skills that software engineers use to write the programs that underlay all of the computer applications we use every day. On our site, you can find resources like curriculum templates and forums for educators to share and support ideas around computational thinking.
In mid-2010, we revamped Google Code University, a collection of university-level computer science tutorials, labs and lectures, to make it easier for people to find and use materials they need. All Google Code University content is Creative Commons-licensed so college professors can use the materials directly in their classrooms.
We provided grants to 35 universities throughout the U.S., Canada, Europe, the Middle East and Asia for Computer Science for High School (CS4HS), a workshop to promote computer science in high school curriculum. With funding from Google, colleges develop a two-day program for local high school CS teachers that incorporates informational talks by industry leaders and discussions on new and emerging CS curricula at the high school level.
Influencing positive changes in education through advocacy and community engagement
We continued to partner with many organizations to advocate the importance of computer science in the classroom, such as Computing in the Core, a non-partisan advocacy coalition of associations, corporations, scientific societies and other non-profits that strive to elevate computer science education to a core academic subject in K-12 education.
We’re excited to be involved in initiatives that highlight the importance of computer science, and look forward to increasing our involvement with Computer Science Education Week in the coming years. Technology and CS are increasingly important to all of us, and we hope others will pay more attention to this critical field. As for Google, we’ll continue to be an advocate for computing and help elevate computer science education at all levels.

Posted by Maggie Johnson, Director of Education and University Relations

Chrome Netbooks for Students

miriam — Thu, 09 Dec 2010 20:28:00 +0000

We recently announced the Chrome notebook Pilot program. We think Chrome notebooks will be super useful for students like you – especially if your school is already using Google Apps for Education –because they deliver a faster, simpler and more secure computing experience, with lower total cost of ownership than traditional PCs.

For more information and to apply for the pilot, visit the Chrome notebook website and check out the full video of yesterday's Chrome event on YouTube:

Posted by Josh Woodward, Chrome Team

A curious guide to browsers and the web

miriam — Fri, 19 Nov 2010 22:04:00 +0000

Many of us spend a ton of time on the World Wide Web, be it reading the news, researching, checking email, or chatting with friends around the world almost instantaneously. And we can do all of these activities through a web browser.

But how do browsers and the web actually work? What do terms like “cookies” or “cloud computing” even mean? More practically, how can we keep ourselves safe from security threats like viruses when we’re online?

To help answer these questions, we collaborated with the illustrator Christoph Niemann to publish an online guidebook called “20 Things I Learned about Browsers and the Web.” This handy guide is for those of us who’d like to better understand the technologies we use every day.

“20 Things” is written by the Chrome team, and continues our tradition of finding new ways to help explain complex but fascinating ideas about technology. Many of the examples used to illustrate the features of the browser refer back to Chrome.

We built “20 Things” in HTML5 so that we could incorporate features that hearken back to what we love about books—feeling the heft of a book’s cover, flipping a page or even reading under the covers with a flashlight. In fact, once you’ve loaded “20 Things” in the browser, you can disconnect your laptop and continue reading, since this guidebook works offline. As such, this illustrated guidebook is best experienced in Chrome or any up-to-date, HTML5-compliant modern browser.

For things you’ve always wanted to know about the web and browsers but may have been afraid to ask, read on at www.20thingsilearned.com (or, you can use the handy shortened URL at goo.gl/20things). If you find “20 Things” informative, don’t forget to share it with your friends and family!

Posted by Min Li Chan, Product Marketing Manager, Google Chrome

Running for office with Google Docs

miriam — Thu, 04 Nov 2010 16:00:00 +0000

A few months ago, my colleague Julia and I were at a technology conference for educators, and we had the chance to hear first-hand how much teachers loved the capabilities that Google Docs brings to their classrooms. They were so excited to show of their favorite features like forms, and working on the same docs at the same time.

We knew we wanted to share that same excitement with even more teachers and students. Inspired by the Search Stories videos, we set off to give one fun example of how Google Docs might be used your school. The result is this video:

As the election results trickle in, we hope you enjoy seeing some of the cool features Google Docs offers in action. Hopefully it will inspire you to think of other great ways to use it on your campus!

Posted by Bryan Carroll, Consumer Operations Strategist, Google Docs

Introducing the Docs Community Channel

miriam — Wed, 03 Nov 2010 17:31:00 +0000

Two years ago, we created the Google Docs Community on YouTube as a space to feature user-created videos about Google Docs. Today, we’re reviving the channel with new life and new videos from the community and the Google Docs team. We even have a special playlist geared especially toward students and teachers.

This channel is a great resource for learning about Google Docs in more detail, and for sharing your success stories and knowledge for others to benefit from. The channel will become even more valuable the more contributions we receive, so we're looking to you to help build this up and make it even better. If you have a demo, tutorial, or testimonial you'd like to share with the world, make a video telling the world all about it and then submit it to the community channel for others to enjoy. Submit your stories on our video submission form – we may even feature it on our blog or Twitter feed!

On the channel, you can view Google Docs success stories:

And learn how to use features in Google Docs and Sites, ranging from basic editing to features used by our most advanced users:

You’ll even be able to check out new Google Docs and Sites features:

Check out the channel to connect with the Docs community and the Google Docs team, and learn tips and tricks. If you want to hear more, just click the subscribe button on the channel, and if you’d like to submit a video to share with the world, simply fill out this form.

Posted by Julia Harter, Google Docs Community Team

Exploring computational thinking

miriam — Mon, 25 Oct 2010 17:00:00 +0000

Take a minute to think back to some of your past science fair projects or lab experiments. What elements did they have in common? What elements were different?

While every project or experiment may have been unique in the problem they were trying to solve, they all followed the same basic template of title, problem, hypothesis, materials, procedure, data and results, and conclusion. This ability to notice similarities, differences and trends is called pattern recognition. The ability to then extract out the unnecessary details and generalize those that are necessary is called pattern generalization, which leads us to an abstraction.

These are just some of the problem-solving skills that we apply when we design and run an experiment. Other skills include decomposition (the ability to break down a tasks into sub-tasks, e.g., when we specify each of the materials that we’ll need to conduct the experiment) and algorithm design (the ability to build a repeatable, step-by-step process to solve a particular problem, e.g., when we create the procedure so that others can understand our process and run that same experiment).

All of these skills make up what we consider to be computational thinking (CT), a set of techniques that software engineers at Google and elsewhere apply all the time to write the programs that underlay the computer applications you use every day, including search, Gmail and Google Maps. Not only is this 21st century skill critical to being successful in the field of computer science, it’s also increasingly important to several careers outside of our industry given the ubiquity of technology in our lives today. As a result, many universities have expanded their traditional majors to now also include studies where key components involve computing. For example, computational neuroscience is the study of how the brain learns and computes, using computational principals to understand perception, cognition, memory and motor behaviors; while computational linguistics involves developing algorithms to process natural languages.

With this changing educational landscape in mind, a group of California-credentialed teachers along with our own Google engineers have developed a program called Exploring Computational Thinking, which is committed to promoting CT throughout the K-12 curriculum to support student learning and expose everyone to this critical set of skills. Similar to some of our other initiatives in education, including CS4HS and Google Code University, we’re providing educators with access to our curriculum models, resources and communities to help them learn more about CT and discuss it as a strategy for teaching and understanding core curriculum, as well as easily incorporate CT into their own curriculum, whether it be in math, science, language, history or beyond.

For more examples on computational thinking or for resources on how to expand on your own CT skills, visit us at: www.google.com/edu/ect.

Posted by Elaine Kao, Education Program Manager

Online Office Hours with Google Docs

miriam — Mon, 04 Oct 2010 17:27:00 +0000

Cross-posted on the Google Docs Blog.

Alex is a senior at Harvard University, and interned this summer on Google's marketing team. Here he shares how he uses Docs to save time (and body heat) braving the cold Eastern winters. If you have a tip to share on this blog, please let us know!

Now that the dorm move-in dust has settled and you have your class schedules all figured out, I wanted to share one of my favorite ways to use Google Docs that might help you stay on top of your work, save some time and maybe even stay a little warmer this school year!

I use the real-time collaboration in Google Docs to hold online office hours with my professors and TAs. This allows me to collaborate, edit and revise my papers and reports in real-time no matter where my TAs or professors are on campus.

The air is already getting pretty crisp here in Boston and – if your school is in a similarly cold climate – you know exactly how nice it can be to avoid that icy trek across campus to office hours during the winter months. Here is how I use real-time collaboration in Google Docs to hold online office hours with my TAs so that I can review, revise and edit my assignments from the comfort and warmth of my own dorm room:

Set up some time to ‘meet’ with your professor or TA (hint: it's easy to do using Google Calendar). Sign into Google Docs at docs.google.com to get started.

Once in Google Docs, click the 'Share' button in the upper right hand corner. Enter your professor or TA’s email address in the ‘Add people’ field and click ‘Share’.

Your professor or TA will receive a link to the doc and a notification telling them that you have shared your doc with them. When they open the doc you will notice that their user name will appear in the top right corner of the screen. You are now collaborating in Google Docs.

Your professor or TA can now help you revise your doc in real time. Clicking the blue box in the upper right hand corner of the screen will allow you to chat with them and ask questions as you move through the doc. Your editor can also add comments to your doc without actually rewriting the text. Highlighting a passage and then selecting 'Insert > Comment' will allow them to make a note about that section to the right of the page.

Your professor or TA’s cursor will be visible as they move through the doc to show where there are currently reviewing or editing. Their cursor will appear in the color corresponding to the box next to their display name in the chat box. When they highlight a passage you will also be able to see their highlighted section in their color. As more people are invited to collaborate on the doc they will have different colors assigned to them so that you can tell who made each comment or revision.

Holding online office hours with Google Docs is just one of the ways to use Google to simplify your life as a student.

Stay tuned for more tips on using Google to make life at school easier on the Google Student Blog or submit your own to share!

Posted by Alex Roux, Harvard University

Stay connected on campus with Google Voice

miriam — Tue, 28 Sep 2010 17:25:00 +0000

Cross posted from the Google Voice Blog

Heading off to college usually means packing up the car and saying goodbye to your family and friends, so the Google Voice team put together a bunch of ways to make it cheaper and easier to stay in touch while you’re on campus. We also thought back to our own days living in dorms and cramming in the library to create a list of student-friendly tips for getting the most out of your phone while you’re away at school.

1. Save your money for something better than minutes
Send unlimited text messages for free -- from your phone or the web
Make free long distance calls in the US and to Canada with Gmail
Call friends studying abroad or call home if you’re an international student for as little as 2 cents/minute

2. Use your phone the way you actually want to
Setup a free Google Voice number that will ring all of your phones at once (dorm phone, cell phone, Gmail, etc.) so you never miss a call {a number that stays with you even if you forget to pay your bill or change cell phone provider]
Get voicemail transcriptions via email and text during class
Enable do not disturb to send your calls directly to voicemail when you want to sleep in on the weekends or need to get some studying done

3. Make calls when your phone can’t

Calling in Gmail makes it possible to call phones from right inside of your Gmail account. This makes a super handy alternative to your mobile phone for things like:

Calling from dorm rooms with non-existent cell phone reception
Locating a mobile phone that is buried in the couch
Ordering a pizza when your phone battery is dead

So grab your Google Voice number, get Google Voice on your mobile phone, or fire up your Gmail account and start making calls. No quarter required.

Google Voice is currently only available in the U.S. And if you’re new to Google Voice, check out our introductory videos at youtube.com/googlevoice.

Posted by Michael Bolognino, Product Marketing Manager

Google Chrome Extensions at School: Get more done!

miriam — Thu, 23 Sep 2010 16:30:00 +0000

Whether you’re writing a term paper for your classic Greek literature class or collaborating with your lab group over IM, Google Chrome extensions can also help you keep track of all the important things you have to do during the day. For our last post in the series, we will highlight a few Chrome extensions to help you stay on task while in school.

Suppose it’s late at night and you have a big exam in the morning, but you’re still watching random videos or playing games on the web. StayFocusd lets you control where you spend your time online by limiting the amount of time you spend on specific web sites. You can also customize your settings to block or allow specific sites or pages.

If you’re like many students who are juggling academics, athletics, a part-time job and social lives, there are so many ways to lose track of your busy schedule. DayHiker is a great extension to help you keep track of upcoming deadlines and meetings. It lets you check your schedule or tasks, preview upcoming events and even check out the weather forecast at the same time.

RemindMe is another useful extension that allows you to set up reminders, so you don’t forget to email those lecture notes to your study group or miss your next class.

We hope these extensions help students like you make the most of your time during the school year. You can find more useful Chrome extensions in the gallery, and if you don’t have Google Chrome yet, you can get the browser here.

Posted by Koh Kim and Meredith Papp, Google Chrome Team