To Google or Not

Google obviously has so much more to offer than I realized. It’s a great manager of information for specific application, a class, a special project, an information sharing space but, frankly, I feel I can do most of these things on Blackboard or my computer manager or even a wiki if I ever figure out how to create one. I can see as a tool as a teacher for sharing teaching strategies or dealing with student issues. I can’t see using it for actual class application overall. I do have one possible use for this which would eliminate the students having to use so much paper. All of my Communication Skills students are required to keep journals about their classroom experiences. If they could all create blogs and then iGoogles to keep track of all the individual blogs, they could share ideas and suggestions as well as concernswhich they could reply to and which I could also reply to so everyone could see. One problem I see is sometimes students write journals they want to keep private, which is always an option I give them. Can this be done?

Another problem I have at this point is the amount of time it would take to teach them to use these technologies for the class. I already feel that time is an issue with these basic skills classes. In time probably most of my students will know how to do these things but I polled my class this summer and only two of twenty knew how to blog or even exactly what a blog is, although all had heard the term. None had heard of iGoogle. This is a slightly older group but I wonder just how tech savvy our students really are.

Maybe I just have to have a situation arise where the tool actually is needed for the project abnd then I will feel comfortable applying this to that project. I wish I could be more specific but maybe inexperience makes me very tentative.