Interesting Google Labs Projects

It’s been a long while since I’ve flipped through Google Labs, and honestly, I can’t remember doing that recently in any depth or with much curiosity.  Not sure why.  I just happened across Google Labs tonight; perhaps it was a twitter mention of Google Shared Spaces – a sort of new/re- incarnation of Google Wave – that led me there.  Giving it a little more time, I noticed several Labs projects that definitely deserve more attention from educators’ – if they’re not already getting that attention: Shared Spaces, Breadcrumb, News Timeline, and Fast Flip.  I’m sure there’s more in Labs I need to find/explore.  Let me know what you find that’s particularly interesting.

Shared Spaces enables sharing a “collaborative gadget with your friends or colleagues, and chat with them at the same time. Choose from a gallery of gadgets – polls, games, drawing, mind mapping, event planning, and more.”  The short version?  It’s Google Wave Light.  It’s a digestable version of Google Wave.  Rather than the entire Google Wave interface and the business it created; Shared Spaces focuses on individual gadgets and tasks.  Plan a trip?  Start a shared space with the Wave Widget focused on that task.  That’s all that space does.  Plan a meeting? Start a shared space that has chat and a calendar with yes, maybe, no voting on each day for users in the space.  Honestly, this simply takes a step back and provides a way for users to begin engaging collaboratively on the Wave interface without the ADD-hysteria that the full Wave interface seemed to create – even for (or perhaps especially for) experienced, tech-savvy collaborators.

Breadcrumb “allows you to create an easy-to-use mobile learning application without any programming experience; your application works with only three additions to plain text. Easy to create and readable on Internet-enabled smart-phones or computers, Google Breadcrumb gives you maximum output for the development time. Interested in learning more?”  At a quick glance, it basically allows very quick, non-programmer development of “choose your own adventure” type learning experiences to be delivered via mobile devices.  Has a range of possibilities in K-20 education.  The information and groups page for the project even lists a number of gaming and learning theory references relevant to the project.

News Timeline “allows users to view news, scanned newspapers and magazines, blog posts, sports scores, and more on a zoomable, graphical timeline.”  I did a quick search for Delicious.com to see what the timeline might reveal; being able to flip through news along the timeline rather than a simple listing of news articles – as you might get from news.google.com – adds quite a bit, cognitively, imo.

Fast Flip, somewhat similar to News Timeline though with a different focus/purpose, offers “blindingly fast overviews of headline pages of top newspapers.”  A quick search returns images and full text of front pages of top news sources.  It’s a more visual perspective of news – more interesting to browse than typical internet searches.