Google offers a multitude of terrific tools that can be used to enhance both teaching and learning. The tools are powerful, user-friendly, and FREE! In the next few months, I’ll be highlighting some of these tools and will share ideas of how they can be used in the classroom.

In order to take advantage of Google’s resources, you will need to have an account. To create one, you just need a valid email address. You could use your school email, a personal email, a yahoo email, or any other type of account.

To set up your teacher account:

1. 1.Go to www.google.com
   

2. 2.Click the “Sign in” link in the upper-right corner:
   
   

   

   
   
   
3. 3.Click the “Create an account now” link at the lower-right:
   
   

   

   
   
   
4. 4.Follow the on-screen prompts to create an account.
   Note - the hardest part will most likely be the word verification where you will have to decipher something like this:
   

   

   
   Don’t get discouraged if you can’t get it right. It may take several tries...
   

5. 5.Check your email for a message from Google. It will include a link that will verify and enable your account.
   
   

To set up a generic student account:
You will probably want your students to use some of the Google tools, but you will NOT want to give them your teacher user ID and password. Click here to see some options for student accounts / logins.

For now, we’re going to use Option 1 - a single generic student account.

This will require a valid email address that is different than the one you used for your teacher account.

I would recommend that you create a Gmail account for this. Bonus - when you set up a gmail account, a Google account is automatically created!

1. 1.Go to www.google.com
   
   

2. 2.Click the “Gmail” link at the top of the screen.
   
   

   

   
   
   
3. 3.Click the “Sign Up for Gmail” link at the lower-right.
   
   

   

   
   
   
4. 4.Follow the on-screen prompts to create an account.
   Note: think carefully about the login name and password. Remember that your students will need to use this information to log in. Let’s say you are a 5th grade teacher at Anywhere Elementary School. You might want to use something like “AESStudent5” for the login and “AESstudentsrock!” for the password:
   
   

   

   
   
   
   

5. 5.Now when you want your students to use a google tool, they can sign in using the “AESStudent5@gmail.com” login and the “AESstudentsrock!” password.