Monday, July 12, 2010
Google!
It's a web site. It's a search engine. It's a dictionary. It's a laboratory.
You can blog with Google. You can upload video with Google. You can e-mail with Google. You can advertise with Google. You can read with Google.
Google is a noun ("let's search with Google"). Google is a verb ("I Googled YouTube and learned that it's owned by Google"). Google can be pretty much anything Google wants to be.
If you use a smart phone, you know that Google is quickly becoming the king of this market, too. Google and Garmin have combined to make a smart GPS phone, and not to be outdone by Steve Jobs and his iPhone, Google and its Android phones are now allowing the average Internet surfer to create Droid applications -- no programming knowledge necessary.
Of course, those Googley marketing gurus wasted little time in touting this new technology as the ultimate Googleness for teachers. Apparently, everything Google does will revolutionize the education world. Now you can teach anything (according to Google, at least) using the new Google/Android App Inventor technology.
Please understand, the message here is not to vilify Google (well, maybe just a little). Here, at Learn it in 5, we like new technology just as much as the next person.
However, with Google constantly creating some new gadget or application and stating to the world that whatever it creates will automatically benefit anyone who uses it, one has to wonder about the costs of all of this Googlification.
Could it be that Google is moving just a little too fast?
