Google Photos - Powerful Classroom Tool - PART I

Google Photos will be 2 years old next month. I was an early adopter after Google I/O 2015 and have yet to be disappointed with my family photos. I was able to move all of my images from Picasa to Google Photos with ease. A bit later Google Photos came to my school apps account in school.

Lately I have been introducing teachers to Google Photos, sharing their classroom learning experiences with whom they choose. This was a bit of a surprise, as I thought most people knew of this amazing tool. Taking nothing for granted, I decided to devote my new few blog posts to my beloved Google Photos and how I use it almost everyday  in my classroom.

Setup is easy and a great place to begin. Google Photos works with PC, Mac, Android and iOS. I did my initial setup from my Chrome browser on my PC at school. I was logged into my GAFE account, clicking the tile menu and then the Google Photos icon. Next Google Photos links and looks for images on your device, asking to upload. I had many backed up on my external hard drive over the years, so it was nice to get all images and videos together.

Taking photos and uploading is so easy. I use a Nexus 7 tablet, but you can use any old unused smartphone in that device draw at home. Simply link to WIFI and add your school GAFE account and download Google Photos from the Play Store. Opening after the install, you will be prompted to personalize your syncing options. I choose to upload immediately after capturing  photo or video, it's that easy.

I keep my Nexus 7 handy for photos or videos at various times of the day in my classroom. I take many photos during science lab to support our learning target. After taking photos, I go to my workstation to group photos by class album I created, then share the album with my students. They can drag any of the album photos to a lab report Gdoc, then caption the learning or summarize their process.

Google Photos is free, with unlimited GAFE storage, so why not use it! Students love photos and so do I. I share photos and videos with parent often. At our March Parent/Teacher Conferences, half of my parent attending thanked my for sharing digital media with them. One parent said, “It prompted an entirely different school discussion at the dinner table”.

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