Day 12 of Summer 2019 #Bookaday Challenge: Google It!

Vlog Transcript Below

Slide 1: Hi! This is Kate Narita, author of 100 Bugs! A Counting Book and a fourth grade teacher, this is day 12 of my summer 2019 #Bookaday Challenge. Today I will be talking about Google It.

Slide 2: Google It by Anna Crowley Redding is an amazing book. I’ve been fortunate enough to have students whose parents work at Google, and they do some pretty amazing things. Now, I’m very excited to have this book in my classroom not only to share it with students whose parents work at Google but with other students who hope to change the world someday.

Slide 3: If you’re going to have Google It in the classroom, you should also have these two books by Laurie Wallmark in the classroom. Ada Byron Lovelace and the Thinking Machine which I’ve talked about in previous #bookaday challenges and Grace Hopper Queen of Computer Code. It’s so important to show every student that they can do whatever they want to do. It’s so important to show our female students that there have been female trailblazers in the field as well. 

Slide 4: Two people that are mentioned in Google It, other than the founders of Google, are Steve Jobs and Bill Gates. These books in the Who Was? Series are much simpler to read than Google It. If you’re looking to see if people are interested in this topic, you might want to start with the Who Was? Series. That’s if you teach third or fourth grade. Fifth graders and higher can start with Google It.

Slide 5: One thing I thought was neat about Google It is that the cofounders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, talk about how they were shooting for the moon. They didn’t know if it was possible to organize all the information on the internet, but they were going to give it a try. If they failed, who cared? At least they were going to go for it. One neat book to have would be Moonshot by Brian Floca which tells the story of how we ended up on the moon. I think this is a great metaphor for what Larry Page and Sergey Brin have done with Google.

Slide 6: Of course not everyone is a supporter of what Google does for various reasons. Here are two books you can have in your library that your students might also want to look at. One is a book about Elon Musk. He questions what Google does, and I think that’s important. The other one is more of a recommendation for young adults. It’s Feed by MT Anderson, and to say that he questions the benefits of technology is putting it lightly. 

Slide 7: Overall, I highly recommend Google It because it embodies the growth mindset that Carol Dweck talks about. It’s really a wonderful book to have in the classroom and share with students to show that anything is possible when you dream.