Interested in Attending the Google Academy?

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Joan Oleck -- School Library Journal, 10/26/2006

You probably use Google for most of your Web searches, and you’ve likely “googled” old boyfriends or girlfriends. Now the search engine is offering users a Google certification.

That’s right. The Google Teacher Academy is inviting 50 hand-picked California educators to the company’s headquarters in Mountain View on November 7 for a free daylong seminar about its products.

Well, if there’s one more thing that Google’s good at, it’s self-promotion. Cristin Frodella, Google product marketing manager, says the seminar will cover the intricacies of Google’s new products—and participants are expected to lead three training activities in their communities this school year.

One product, Google Earth, offers aerial photos of most places on Earth. Teachers can use it, Frodella explains, to help students “fly in” to locales—Shakespeare’s birthplace, for example, or the site of the Globe theater where the Bard’s plays were produced—and in the process master geography.

Google Docs & Spreadsheets, another new offering, has online word processing and spreadsheet programs so that multiple students can collaborate, live, on a single project—from the comfort of their own homes. They can also use the product to obtain teacher or parental feedback before a project is handed in.

Because of such applications, librarians “are extraordinarily excited about this program,” Frodella says. Indeed, the company, at the time of the interview, was receiving 30 applications a day, she says. To gain admission to the academy, educators had to submit a one-minute video on “motivation and learning” or “K-12 innovation.”

They also had to overlook what seems a blatant effort by the company to push its brand further into the schools. Commenting on that issue, Frodella argued that “all these products are free; [that] they all have great educational applications.” Besides, she said, teachers and librarians already were asking for help guiding their students through Google’s tools.

Frodella offers a “teacher’s helper” blog at http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2006/10/teachers-helper.html, and the search engine already reaches out to librarians and other educators via www.google.com/educators and www.google.com/librariancenter. “Librarians are hugely important to us in our education efforts,” she says.