Google+ Hangouts is a new tool that can really help us move things beyond our four walls. I have used Hangouts to take part in discussions in my online Masters classes and I have also used it just to connect with friends that live across the country. As a teacher, you can easily use this to stage a review session at night, bring in professionals and experts in your content area, and even create videos for your classroom for your students.
Students, and staff, need to have enabled their Google+ accounts in order to take part in Hangouts. This is easy to do, just log in to your Google account and you will see in the upper left a Google+ or You+ link. Click that and go through the steps it gives you to enable this account. Once you have that done, you are all ready to do the steps in the video to create your Hangouts.
If you are going to do this with your students, make sure you go through the steps of setting up the Google+ accounts before. A video will be created of your Hangout and posted to your Youtube account. You can have students view this who were gone or you can save it for future reference. There are editing tools in Youtube so you can always make sure your video works well.
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