 Hello, I'm Rebecca Page, and today we will be exploring Google Photos as a way to connect our classroom communities. Before we get started, don't forget to subscribe and hit that bell to enable notifications for our channel by clicking our logo during the video. Also, leave us a comment or check out our other related videos by clicking the pop-up cards in the upper right-hand corner. Here's how to get started with Google Photos. We are going to use the Google Photo album to tell our photo stories and to connect our classroom communities. We're going to do that through weekly photo challenges. Look at week one photo challenge. I've highlighted it here. Share a picture from last school year when you were with your classmates. This is a great first week photo challenge. There is a link to the document where the students can actually post their photos for their photo challenges and allows you to connect them to each other and to you. Here's an example of some pictures from last school year. The great thing about a Google Photo album is when you create one that's accessible to all the students in the community, they're able to add photos to that album and it allows you to see them in a new way. The pictures are worth a thousand words. You're going to get a lot of community engagement with this way because it is similar to social media in Google Classroom. It didn't give students options to post pictures and this even allows them to post videos here too. They can add to the album with their cell phones, with their Chromebooks, their laptops, Chromebooks, etc. These are pictures from last school year and you can really see how we can really reminisce about the experiences that we have shared or maybe that we connect with and then we're able to like, comment and share, excuse me, like and comment here. The heart allows you to like and I've already liked it and comments are over here and you can already see I've commented there. Now, activity for the whole album is awesome as a teacher or as a student. I even like to look at that even as a community member to see all the interactions that have happened in the album. You can see who has commented, who has liked what they have said and it is a great way to add feedback into your classroom community. So how do I create this classroom album for each of my classes? Well, to do that, you go to your Google Apps. You can find it in your Gmail and go to the nine little Google App Waffle looking button and when you click on that, Google Photos is all the way at the bottom. It looks like a windmill with four different colors. Once you click on Google Photos, it will take you to your photos that are on there but in the library section on the left hand corner now is albums and so albums is under library and once you go to albums, it will take you to albums and then you will create an album. So once you click on again, Google Photos, albums, you will create an album in the upper right hand corner and you will create one for each of your classes. If you're going to do Google Photo Challenges or Photo Challenges each week, you'll add your title. You can add a photo. You can click done but you want to go to these more options. So turn your attention to the upper right hand corner. We want to go to options because we want to have, we want to be able to share a link with our Google Classroom family. Once we have our Google Classroom link, the next thing we're going to do is make sure that they can collaborate, comment and like with other students in the community of course and we copy that link and that is the link we post in Google Classroom. So that's the link that would take you to your Google Classroom album and each week you would post a new photo challenge. Here are 10 examples. The second one could be what brings you joy, your favorite quote about overcoming trials and hardships, maybe start to add some humor, memes about social distancing or their favorite, something that they think stands for the day that the world changed in a different way, funny or favorite workout pose that we could all try, something or someone who brings you joy, the weirdest thing you've ever eaten, something you're passionate about or what's trending now, if you get the idea this is just a springboard, have fun with it. Thanks so much for watching. Be sure to like, comment or reply to one of our other videos or share the playlist below. Subscribe to our channel and enable notifications that you don't miss out on the next episode. Don't forget to check out our other resources like Discast, Podcast and see what else is going on at Ori County Schools. Be sure to follow us at Dear Dis is on social media or contact us via email or our blog.