New additions to Google Hangouts– including an icon to take snapshots of the group!

One of the Google features I absolutely love is Google Hangouts. They have incredible potential for the teacher in the classroom, for professional development purposes and for older students to use for collaboration. Google, of course, is always improving its projects and you never know when something is about to improve before your eyes, and this has proved true of Hangouts! Here are three new features that I have noticed.

1. 'Hangouts chat' now get an extension on the Chrome toolbar
Chrome is such a versatile browser to use. My browser bar is populated with extensions which enable a quick and seamless browser experience which puts everything at your fingertips. You just click on the required extension on your browser bar and “it happens”.  

Google has recently created an extension for Hangouts called ‘Hangout chats’ and I have just added it to my toolbar. With this app, you just click on it and it opens a screen in the bottom right hand corner of your browser page for chatting to whoever is a member of your Google+ community. This reminds me of the Skype chat feature which I often felt was sadly missing with hangouts.


2. A new video launcher app for Hangouts
Another new feature is a video launcher app for hangouts. This can be added to the Chrome
apps section of your browser on any device and it enables you to launch a hangout from there. What could be simpler! You can see mine on the second row from the bottom in the screenshot below.




3. Take snapshots while you are talkingOne can have a lot of fun while participating in a Hangout, and the newest addition for this is the addition of the camera icon with the word ‘Capture’ on the left side.  I experienced a reunion hangout with buddies from the New York Google Teacher Academy 2012 on Sunday evening and this was a good opportunity to try this out. (This regular reunion is a fun time of catching up with news and views, and various teachers slip in and out of the Hangout as their time permits.) On the side bar below you can see the word ‘Capture’. Whenever anyone clicks on it it takes a photo of whoever is in focus but the awesome is that it lets everyone know so that there is no secrecy about it.

Below you can see JR Ginex-Orinion, a Science High School teacher from New York, with his cute little daughter, Katie. He was preparing for her birthday party so we were singing ‘Happy Birthday’ to her; and you can see that some of us captured snapshots. The camera icon at the side tells how many snapshots have been snapped and the little camera then settles on the thumbnail photo below the main picture showing who took the photo.

All the photos taken by anyone on the Hangout appear on one’s Google+ events stream afterwards and I particularly liked this one captured by Linda Yollis from Los Angeles.

If you haven’t tried Google Hangouts before you really are missing out!  They are free with your Google account. Try them!

Have you see the new #G+eduhangout site? Take a look…

One of the participants at the amazing Google Teacher Academy New York in October 2012, Brent Catlett, has created an awesome new site called #G+Eduhangouts. http://eduhangout.org/

This is what Brent says about the site: 

This is Brent

"#G+eduhangout has been designed to:

• Connect educators together all across the world using Google + Hangouts.
• Bring experts, authors, and kids together.
• Share the wonderful things happening in your classroom with others.
• Learn from others that are willing to share.
• and a whole lot more. . ."

Ideas for using #G+eduhangout
Brent  gives a whole page of ideas on how to use the site: " #G+eduhangout was created with the idea of flattening the globe, connecting students in classrooms with other students, and sharing the #edugood things going on inside classrooms all over the world.  This lists of ideas is simply some thoughts.  The creativity in which educators spin things is merely up to them.  Run with these ideas, build off them, create new ones.  Please do not hestitate to contact me to add your idea to this page."

• These ideas cover Reading / LA / Writing / English, Maths, Science, Social Studies etc.
• Have a Virtual Book Club
• Conduct a Math Bee with multiple classes
• Show off an experiment
• Use it for mapping / geography skills
• Conduct a global research project together and report back via #G+eduhangout
• Book talk
• Share projects and demonstrations
• Share writing & get feedback from other students
• Have students show younger students something they are working on & vice versa
• Have people from different places talk to you about the weather in their area at the time
• Parts of lessons, perhaps 3 or 4 groups each take a part in the lesson
• Connect with Authors and Poets.  Here is a GREAT list of Authors on Twitter:  http://goo.gl/as03t 
• Perhaps share Apps that are being used and share how they are being used.
• Experiments could be looked at from week to week with students hypothesizing and questioning possibilities
• Discuss qualities of your school, city, state, country like size, population, weather, tourist attractions, etc. with other places
• Connect with students to discuss their coursework and papers for a research course
• English classes could do characters from stories and compare and contrast novels
• Show off a class pet, live creatures, or exotic animal from local zoo visit to your classroom
• Have a Quest to connect with every State or multiple countries to gain research data for a project
• Interview experts and leaders in the field and record #G+eduhangout on air and then have for use in class later
• Connect your BLOGGERS with their audience 
• Have a Mystery Hangout with other classes from all over the world and have students ask questions to guess where they are from.
• For PE the class could have athlete, Olympian, or fitness gurus join the Hangout
• Use it to collaborate with other schools reading the same text
• Celebrate special events or holidays.  For example, during World Read Aloud Day our high school students read to our elementary students in different buildings

and loads more ideas!

Whew, this all looks awesome. Brent gives detailed instructions of how he envisions this site developing:

How to create a live Hangout on Air

I have been quite fascinated by the concept of a Google Hangout plus the concept of Google+ Hangouts On Air, which lets you broadcast to an unlimited audience.  I have experienced both and this is a real hit from Google. (I can’t say that I fully understand it all perfectly) yet I must admit! In this post I want to talk more about the live Hangout on Air and show how to create one.

What exactly is a Google Hangout on Air?

A normal Hangout can only have ten viewers but Hangouts On Air allow you to publicly broadcast your Hangouts on YouTube and your Google+ stream for anyone to watch. This is amazing – it’s like having your own live video show on the web!

When broadcasting, your video will stream live on your YouTube account as well as on your Google+ stream. This means you can share your YouTube URL with anyone who wants to watch your broadcast live or they can watch in your Google+ stream.

So what is the process then for a hangout on Air?

Here is a brief summary:
1. Create your hangout or schedule your hangout and invite people.
If you invite more than 25 people they won’t get a personal invite but
the invitation will rather just occur in your stream. Also note that this is the time you have to decide whether it will be a Hangout on air. Check the button that enables Hangouts on Air.

2. Prepare your YouTube channel.This might only be necessary the first time you use a Google+ hangout

3. Edit Your Hangout When Complete
After your Hangout On Air, you can edit the video in your YouTube account(connected to your Google+ account). Simply go to your Video Manager page and click on the Video Editor link on top of the page.

4. Share Your Recorded HangoutOnce you’re happy with your video, you can then share it just like any other YouTube video.

A Slideshare on how to create a live Hangout on Air

Please take a look at this SlideShare entitled, ‘How to create a Google+ Hangout on Air' and which has more detail on how to create a Hangout on Air.

How to conduct a Google+ Hangout on air from Fiona Beal

Extra reading
http://www.socialmediaexaminer.com/google-hangouts-on-air-guide/
http://www.socialmediaexaminer.com/youtube-live-streaming/
http://www.youtube.com/live/all
http://sproutsocial.com/insights/2012/05/how-to-hangouts-on-air/

Get the hang of a Google+ hangout (plus webinar recording)

What is a Google hangout?
Google+ is Google's new social networking tool. I have only just discovered its amazing potential since attending the Google Teacher Academy in New York in October. Google has put a lot of funding into developing Google+ and they are committed to making it work well for education, so it will just get better and better I am sure. Once you have created a circle of friends in Google+ you can choose to hang out with them on Google+. This allows you to video chat, IM chat, watch YouTube videos together, and more.

Summary of benefits
Google Hangouts are part of Google+, Google's new free social networking tool. On a Hangout 10 people (possible 15 on Google Apps) can:
*video chat
*IM (instant message) chat
*watch YouTube videos together
*collaborate on a Google Doc
*use a whiteboard collaboratively
*add effects for fun
*record the Hangout directly on YouTube
*live stream for more viewers
*A minimum of two people
*and more…

A Slideshare showing the steps
This slideshare was used in the SchoolNet webinar of the same name and shows the steps in creating a hangout.

Get the hang of a Google+ hangout from Fiona Beal

Webinar recording:
Last week SchoolNet had a webinar whih was presented by me (Fiona Beal) on 'Get the hang of a Google Hangout'. Here is the recording. 
http://meet78641452.adobeconnect.com/p6kgz1ndmhz/ (22 mins)

Ideas for using a hangout in the the classroom
• Read a story
• Bring in an expert/guest speaker/author|
• Share from a Slideshare
• Homework tutoring
• Professional Development meeting
• Work on a project together
• Virtual penpals
• Global classroom discussions
• Career Day wit panelists
• Attend other hangouts (Google has a whole library of hangouts)
• Extended discussion on a class topic
• Subject-related hangouts
• Conduct workshops and seminars

Additional reading and viewing
a) A tutorial 
Please note that Google updates its products continually so some features in this video might look different.


b) Further Reading
*How to use Google Hangouts 
*How to Use Google+ Hangouts for Teaching
*How to create a Google event

Have you discovered Google Hangouts?

Linda Yollis

Most days I think that Google must be the most exciting company on the planet right now. Perhaps this is because I was exposed to their extreme creativity at the recent Google Teacher Academy I attended in New York!  Every day something new pops up with Google.  For example, I have just read and tweeted about another amazing thing that is happening in the Googlesphere from the Google blog! "If you ever dreamed of playing in a band, now’s your chance to be a rock star. JAM with Chrome is an interactive web application that enables friends in different locations to play music together in the Chrome browser on their computers. No matter what your level of talent—from daydreaming air guitarist to music pro—you can JAM together in real time over the web.” This could be such fun! You can read about that here: http://goo.gl/mpZ8K. but back to the topic of Google hangouts…

Google hangouts
This is one of Google’s really incredible offerings and if you haven’t discovered it yet, now is the time. It has enormous implications for education and the global classroom. Google+ is Google's social networking tool. Once you have created a circle of friends, you can choose to hang out with them on Google+. This allows you to video chat, IM chat, watch YouTube videos together, and more. A hangout is a similar concept to Skype but you can do so much more with it. You can chat live face to face with a circle of people, share documents, work on and edit a Google document together during the hangout, create a video of the chat and upload it to YouTube, and a host of other things…all for free!

Latest news on hangouts
Another new thing has just happened today! Google announced today that it has extended the limit for the number of people you can invite to a Google+ hangout from 10 to 15 when it is used for education. http://goo.gl/GIkBD. 

How do you create a hangout?
It is a really simple process. You schedule a hangout in a calendar entry, join a hangout directly from Gmail. For a detailed step-by-step process read this article in Wiki-how http://goo.gl/cu5aQ

My experience of a hangout today
The possibilities available with hangouts are endless. I have just been part of an amazing hangout that was a reunion of eight friends from the Google Teacher Academy in New York. How it all started was that Brent Catlett, a District Instructional Technology Trainer in the US wrote a post called #GTANY Part 7  reflecting on several of the people he had met during the Google Teacher Academy in New York. He then tweeted those he had mentioned and next thing we had arranged a reunion hangout which has just happened. The time was 3:30 am for me but I wouldn’t have missed it for anything!

Brent Catlett

It was awesome just catching up and hearing some news. Linda Yollis a Grade 2 and 3 teacher in Los Angeles has a world famous blog Mrs Yollis’ classroom blog . Her class recently had a hangout with JR Ginex-Orinion's class (JR is a chemistry high school teacher). You can read about it in her post. http://yollisclassblog.blogspot.com/2012/11/mr-jrs-science-stop-matter-matters.html.  JR’s class imparted Science safety tips and  information to Linda’s class and got them really excited about Science!

JR Ginex-Orinion

Linda Yollis

Brent Catlett from the USA and Tanya Avarith from Canada mentioned how they are already creating digital footprints for their own very young children at home and teaching them safety online while they are young. In fact Tanya is part of a big safety online research project that is taking place and she will be going to visit Facebook soon as part of this project. Others on the hangout shared about how their schools conduct professional development sessions which was very interesting to hear about. And so we chatted and shared our news….

Google effects in hangouts
As everyone was signing off Linda and I were experimenting with the Google effects you can use during a hangoout. Google has added 100+ apps to their hangouts.

Linda Yollis and Fiona Beal

You never know what you might learn on a hangout! Last week Brenda Hallowes and I were having a hangout and Brenda invited a teacher from the Global Classroom project in Mexico who happened to be online to join us. He was busy teaching a Grade 6 class which he introduced us to. Lo and behold his students were all working away on their iPads as though using a tablet was the most natural thing in the world. Incredible for a South African teacher to observe!

So please explore using a hangout. It will be an incredibly enriching experience.