Official Google Blog |
- There’s no place like home for math education
- Free phone support for AdWords advertisers
- Google Crisis Response: a small team tackling big problems
| There’s no place like home for math education Posted: 05 Apr 2011 09:00 AM PDT Last month, we mobilized a small but enthusiastic band of Google engineers to visit schools across the county as part of National Engineers Week. Googlers talked to kids about their career experiences and how they became engineers. The school visits also provided Googlers with an opportunity to get away from their desks and connect with a classroom of students. One group traveled right down the road from our headquarters to visit our local schools in Mountain View, Calif. This volunteering program is part of our broader effort to help develop and inspire the next generation of engineers and computer scientists. And we want to make sure we're helping that happen not only around the world, but also in our own neighborhood. In that spirit, we're awarding a $1 million grant to the Mountain View Whisman School District (K-8) to help improve math achievement for its students. Math education is critical not only to computer science and engineering careers, but to academic success overall. My daughter and I have a bedtime routine where we read a story and also make up mathematical word problems that we solve together. I believe it's important to teach her math and problem-solving skills that she can apply broadly. And developing these skills early on is crucial. In fact, a recent education report noted that understanding math concepts in early school years may be a more important predictor of future achievement than reading skills. We want to help level the playing field and ensure all students in our community are getting a strong foundation in math, so this grant will help deliver resources and strategies to support students who are struggling in the subject. As a Googler and the proud parent of a child in the Mountain View Whisman School District, I'm thrilled about this news. Mountain View has been a great home for Google and we're pleased to be able to support our hometown.      |
| Free phone support for AdWords advertisers Posted: 05 Apr 2011 08:00 AM PDT We've worked hard to keep in touch with our AdWords customers and we're always looking for new ways to support you. Currently we offer email and online support, and today we're introducing free phone support for all of our U.S.- and Canada-based AdWords customers. When you have a question about your account or advertising campaigns, you can now call an AdWords specialist if you prefer. We're adding phone support for a simple reason: you asked for it! You told us that while you appreciate online resources like our AdWords Help Center, you also want the option to get live, expert support when you need it. We heard you, and got to work assembling a team of AdWords experts to answer your calls. The new phone option is one of many tools that can help you succeed with AdWords—and (most importantly!) find even more customers. You can also email us, or learn from other advertisers in the AdWords Help Forum. Our AdWords Online Classroom offers free online courses on a wide variety of AdWords topics, from the basics to great tips to take your account to the next level. To speak to one of our specialists, give us a call at 1-866-2Google between Monday-Friday, 9am-8pm Eastern Time. This number is for current AdWords advertisers only, so please make sure you have your customer ID ready. We look forward to speaking to you and learning more about your business. We'll roll phone support out to advertisers in other countries in the coming months.     |
| Google Crisis Response: a small team tackling big problems Posted: 04 Apr 2011 01:38 PM PDT This is the latest post in our series profiling entrepreneurial Googlers working on products across the company and around the world. Speed in execution is important for any Google product team, but as we learned after the recent earthquakes in both Japan and New Zealand, it's even more critical in crisis response. This post is an inside look at the efforts of our year-old Crisis Response team, and what they're doing to make preparedness tools available to anyone at the click of a button. - Ed. The Google Crisis Response Team came together in 2010 after a few engineers and I realized that we needed a scalable way to make disaster-related information immediately available and useful in a crisis. Until a little over a year ago, we responded to crises with scattered 20 percent time projects, but after the Haiti earthquake in January 2010 we saw the opportunity to create a full-time team that would make critical information more accessible during disaster situations. For us to help during a crisis, it's vital to get things done really quickly, and we've been able to do that as a small team within Google. Working from a standard already developed by one of the Google engineers, Person Finder was built and launched in 72 hours after the Haitian earthquake, and it launched within three hours after the New Zealand earthquake in February. Unfortunately, there have been an unusually high number of disasters over the last year, forcing us to learn and get even faster. Within minutes of hearing about the 9.0 magnitude earthquake off the coast of Japan in March, Googlers around the world—from engineers to webmasters to product managers—immediately started organizing a Google Crisis Response resource page with disaster-related information such as maps and satellite imagery, Person Finder and news updates and citizen videos on YouTube. In Japan, Person Finder went live within an hour of the earthquake. More than 600,000 contact entries have been made since then—more than all other disasters combined—and there have been several reports of people finding their loved ones safe. I was inspired by my colleagues' ability to launch tools about an hour after the earthquake struck; the Tokyo office, in particular, has really been helping to drive the rapid response and provided real-time information to teams across the globe, even while aftershocks were rocking the city and buildings were still swaying.  So in addition to building products, we collaborate with many incredible organizations to make technology useful for responding to a crisis. For example, Random Hacks of Kindness is a collaboration between technology companies and government organizations which encourages teams around the world to create software solutions to problems that arise during a crisis. Recent "RHoKstars" have created all sorts of useful tools—from HeightCatcher, which helps identify malnourishment of children in relief camps by accurately assessing height and weight through a mobile device, to new features for Person Finder, such as email notifications, automatic translation and phonetic name matching—which have all been extremely useful in Japan. These projects present a real opportunity to improve lives by employing crowd-sourcing technology and real-time data during a crisis. The sheer number of major natural disasters in 2010 and early 2011 demonstrates just how important it is for those involved in relief efforts to have real-time access to information no matter where they are. The Google Crisis Response team has worked over the past year to develop open source initiatives that encourage collaboration with larger crisis response efforts, including relief organizations, NGOs and individual volunteers. And although we're a small team and still relatively new to the crisis response ecosystem, we hope the resources and support we receive from Google and our community partners around the world will make a difference in preparedness efforts.     |
| You are subscribed to email updates from The Official Google Blog To stop receiving these emails, you may unsubscribe now. | Email delivery powered by Google |
| Google Inc., 20 West Kinzie, Chicago IL USA 60610 | |
No comments:
Post a Comment