A Visit to Google HQ (NZ)

 Recently Point England staff visited the Google Headquarters in New Zealand.  We were welcomed into their new headquarters and we were impressed by the use of technology to create some amazing work spaces with New Zealand themes.

Steve Smith, the Program Manager of Google for Education in New Zealand gave a presentation of some of the new developments in Google Education.  "Google is a learning company" that believes great learning is accessible to everyone.  It certainly shows this with impressive statistics of 150 million + Google classroom users around the globe.  Google is not just about Chromebooks and computers.  They offer technology and tools to help educators and students.  Hence the new product announcements we were given a preview of.

Two produces that were of great interest to me were the Read along, personalised reading program and the Google Earth Timelapse.

Read along which is coming soon sounds like an exciting aid to help students learn to read.  It has corrective feedback and practice activities and is at many different levels.  There are over 1,000 stories and interactive word games.

Google Earth has always been a fascinating program to look at our earth from space and then zoom in to see a birds eye view of familiar, and not so familiar, places.  Google has now added time lapse photography to its engine.  It is fascinating to see images of how areas develop over time and see history unfold before your eyes. 

Thanks to Google for hosting us and giving us a fascinating incite into further developments