Aviary addition to Google Apps for Edu

Billings 7th and 8th graders use Google Apps for Edu regularly to communicate with peers and faculty.  The Calendar service allows us to keep track of athletics, trips and community events.  Docs provides free document and spreadsheet editing and publishing. Sites are used for student, faculty and class homepages.

Today we added a new service to the Google suite: Aviary.  Aviary is an online editing suite for sound recording, graphics and vectors.  7th grade students spent Tech this week playing with the new tools – creating custom t-shirt designs, remixing beats and mocking up album covers for an iCLAST identity project.

Our mission: to figure out if these tools are intuitive enough and robust enough to use regularly. While these online offerings aren’t as powerful as their software counterparts (Photoshop, Garageband, Illustrator), they are free and accessible from home/school/library/anywhere with an internet connection.

So far so good, we’ll keep testing and report our findings in future posts.

Billings students: to access Aviary, log in to Google Apps.  In the top left corner you’ll see “Documents Calendar Sites more.”  Select “more” and then “Aviary” from the dropdown list.  Enjoy.