Quite the Wide Dashboard
So the buzz around the interwebs these days is ‘what in the world did Google do to Google+?’ Google+, for those living in caves, is Google’s answer to Facebook. While it started slow, I definitely like a lot of the functionality. We use it in our Y Princess tribe to organize us Dads, I use it to organize my photos from my phone (love, just love auto-upload!), and I use it for the Hangout video chatting. So what does Google do as more and more people look to adopt it? They change it all around. In the photo, you see three columns now where you used to see just one. While it does not sound like much, trust me, it matters. Much more difficult to look through all your content, and it heightens the chance to miss something. If, like Google wants, you use this to organize all you instances of life, from professional, to school, to hobbies, to family, this will definitely pose more challenges for you.
We continue to think about eventually using this in our school district. Children may not have any issue with this…maybe I am just now on the old fogie side, as I did just celebrate another birthday last week. I still see Google+ being a great way to organize a classroom. Whether you teach elementary (sharing info with parents) or different classes in high school, the Circle feature still makes so much sense. But as Google is renowned for doing, they mess and mess with something, and then may eventually fold it once we become engrained in it (Reader. Notebook. Etc. Etc. Etc).
