Google Buzz in Education

Google buzz is a social networking platform where users can access and control all of their online networks. It is also a messaging tool integrated into Gmail service allowing its users to  share status messages , comments , photos , links all in one conversational box .
Google buzz is a free service provided by google and although it is  relatively new it has really made a big buzz in the world of social networking next to Orkut and OpenSocial. Just as we did in the previous posts when we explored the educative uses of google alerts and igoogle ( refer to the posts entitled Igoogle in the classroom  and google alerts educative secrets to learn more about these two applications ) I will be walking you through a step by step tutorial on how we can use google buzz in education .
To really understand the impact of google buzz , you need to imagine Cramming , Foursquare, Yelp , Facebook , Yammer , and Twitter gathered into one social network .The creation of google buzz is just another stroke of genius from the part of google engineers .

How can I get started with Google Buzz ?

First , watch this one minute fifty seconds video to have a general idea about this service then proceed with your reading .

Intro to Google Buzz

To start using google buzz you need to have a gmail account ( if you do not have one then sign up now ) , now that you have a valid gmail or google address you either go to www.google.com/buzz , or log on to your gmail account and on the left sidebar , you look for an icon that looks like this:

Click on it and there you are in google buzz main page .

Now to benefit from google buzz free services like sharing photos , videos, and starting conversations about interesting things you find online , proceed as follows :
There are two options to share things either publicly with everyone on the web or privately with only the people you know or your friends


The best thing about this buzz thing is that you get responses to what you are sharing .All the comments , feedback and reactions a buzz will generate will always land in your inbox and you can answer back right from there .
To send a direct email about a post to someone without letting others see it , you need to type @ and use gmail’s autocomplete feature to find email addresses of your contacts .when you type the message tick the private option and click on “post to other groups” and create an empty group you can call it whatever you want then you hit send .This is a screenshot of the email would look like

This is in brief some of the features of google buzz ; to learn more about it you need to read this article : Google Buzz Tips.

How can we use google buzz in education ?

Students can use google buzz to :

• communicate easily with each other .It is a better alternative to twitter and facebook .
• Students will no longer log on to different social sites to keep track of their friends or teachers ‘ updates .They can do it all in one place : Google buzz .
• Google buzz provides a golden opportunity for students who are shy or not confident to follow along and learn from other people’s conversations

Teachers can use google buzz to :

• assign and collect tasks .
• make direct comments either to individual students or to the whole class .
• Google buzz eliminates the exhaustive hard copy paper work at school as all the messages and materials can be shared on request .
• Unlike other socializing sites like twitter and facebook , google buzz allows teachers to specify who can see a buzz , and therefore teachers can target students with special needs through buzzes made just for them.

This is all about Google buzz in education