Hey everyone! We are back from spring break with a super fun episode! Have you heard about the amazing new playground from Google called Google Labs? It's a real treasure trove of cool, interactive experiments that will spark your students' imagination and encourage them to think outside the box.

On this week's episode, we give an overview of the Google Experiments replacement, and explore ImageFX, Instrument Playground, and DJ ModeFX!

• LABS.GOOGLE

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And I'm really excited about this week's episode because after today, we have to turn around We've hit episode 180.

Wow. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. So we've got a complete 180 and now we're going back the other way.

It was spring break. Which was always fun. We enjoy spring break. I did not have two weeks off, but we took two weeks off of the podcast because we needed the weekend before the weekend after since Easter fell in there and we went to Disney. We did. So yeah, so it was a fun little break, but now we are cranking into the end of the school year.

Fourth quarter. The weather here is still cold and gross in Wisconsin. We had a snow storm, snow day this week. So there's that. So this week, moving forward. Let's hope there's some spring weather and it's pleasant outside.

Let's be real. Yeah. You know, our weather is never what we think it's going to be. It's supposed to be, uh,

A lot of time for me to be trolling the internet on my phone, especially in airports. And we all know in past episodes, I mean, we can pull up probably every single time that I have mentioned Google, Google Chrome experiments, which I have always been a huge fan of, Which originally is experimentswithgoogle.

com. Yes. And over the past 14 years, so my podcast has not been around that long, but over the past 14 years, Google Experiments, they have created 1, 613 experiments. That's a lot of experiments. Which is awesome. However, for those of you that don't know, Google Experiments has made a change. What? And they are no longer a thing.

No! And they point out that in the In the thought of change and experimenting, they're going to make a change. So Google Chrome experiments still exist in like the past experiments site, however, Google now has a new place to house cool projects and it is labs. google

google. How do they get that? I want Labs.

I'm going to highlight a couple of them today. But like the homepage I feel like you just need to be on the homepage right now. Okay, because the home page the visuals Like they float around the screen and they like bump around so you can like drag and move the shapes and they like Move, but the links still work like they're animated, but you control the animation on the home page That's like how you want.

I don't know. I just thought it was cool. Like Not your usual homepage for anything and there's like little things twirling around the screen and it's just kind of cool. So Labs at Google will be similar to your Chrome experiments kind of deal so there's all kinds of just cool things that people come up with and submit to Google and they have a team of people and Just all kinds of cool ideas being shared And so I'm going to highlight a few of them today, but I'm not, I mean, I'm just going to highlight a couple of them because like Chrome experiments, there's like all kinds of them.

So the first one. For wherever you are on the screen. Cause that's something like I referenced, like at the top, right. Yeah. I can't do that because when you go to the site, it'll look, I don't know, look for the yellow lumpy star flower.

So image FX. That's the product. And. Click try now. Yeah. sign in with my Google account. Yeah. So sign in with your Google account. I'm already there. So I have a Google account. Don't want any of those things. And we love a fun AI image creator and this one you don't have to pay for, and you don't have like limits on stuff.

Like a lot of them you do. So, and it tells you ahead of time, like, make sure this is community appropriate, you know, all that kind of stuff. Cause sometimes we worry about with our students, making sure that they're obviously appropriate. So you can choose, um, a crayon drawing of a wolf in a nightshirt.

Maybe we could use this for Little Red Riding Hood and And you just click generate. And what I like about this one is it'll, you know, it takes a second to generate the pic, the pictures that you choose. But then what's cool is when it's generating the certain words, it then gives you dropdowns to make changes to them.

So then I can click the dropdown and change my crayon drawing to a charcoal drawing, and I don't have to type anything new in. I just click my little dropdown arrow. And then it resets and gives me my next set of pictures. I said, generate, and it will do the next set and it keeps them for you. And you can like scroll through the images that you're creating and choosing.

Is that fun? Like it's a little extra compared to like what you've done before.

Yep. So I did a wolf in a night shirt and a hat and I shifted from crayon drawing to pencil drawing, but they're so cool. And it is that we're like passing our computers back and forth through each other. This is so weird. But then.

My night shirt can shift from pajamas to a robe to a tuxedo. So it's a really fun experiment and you have your images there. So it's different than some of those other AI generators that we've talked about before, just because this has so many different. Options with it. Mm-Hmm. . Um, and it's very user friendly and like protected.

So that's a fun one to play around with.

And the PodMic, which was your mic you had before I went and spent three times as much on the mic. Right. Yeah.

So long as they're searching appropriate things, it's fine. So, okay. Back to labs at Google. So leave the yellow squiggly star thing. And then the green, I don't even know, like hexagon again, like they move around the screen, the instrument player going to next. So that's still from arts and culture. This one does still come up from arts and culture.

So this is why I wanted to point this one out was that some of these new, like Google labs will shift back and forth to experiments. So they're not like gone forever. So like blob opera and all of our favorites, like they're still there. Okay. That was worried about that. So you can still pull up some of the other ones.

Um, and they'll still come up for you. This one is really cool. You pick an instrument. And it will compose music with the specific instrument that you want. And you can change your AI generated instrument, and then you can click next and you can type in like an adjective and how you want it to sound like moody or mellow or whatever you want to say.

And then it will. I don't know if you can hear this, but it like comes up with AI generated audio clip for 20 seconds, based on your mood and your instrument that you want. Yeah. And then you can click on the keys. Like if you want to add things in your own keyboard, you can add different things into there and then click next.

And then you can change your beat. So you can add your beat into there as you choose to, and then you can add your pitch and you can make adjustments to the ambience on it. Like Sound and then once you're good you hit end and then you hit go and it comes up with this like cool Song that you can play which is kind of really awesome.

It is awesome. Yeah, so yeah There's all kinds of I don't know if you can like you're me playing kind of sort of And then you can record off of it, too

In your creative writing lessons or even your descriptive writing lessons or narratives like those pieces You can hear the sound like make a sound for what your character. I want some suspense Topian book would be listening to exactly. There's just all kinds of things. It's fun. And

So that was the instrument playground.

And there's one more on the home screen. I want to show you because there's, but wait, there's more, , on the, I think on the left side of the, Beaker. Nope. I'm on the right side of the beaker. Yeah. When you look at the site, you'll totally understand what I'm talking about, but right now I'm trying to explain this.

Okay. So there's a giant blue oval. It's called DJ mode. Music. Bye. Are you in

You're gonna turn the bass up on your soundboard. It's optimizing

Let's see. I want to make a romance

Yeah. This is that hip hop romance theme, a lot of driving base, but we could say, uh, You want it to have soaring strings instead.

Like it's so much fun. So you can DJ all that you want and all your DJing amazingness. And it's just a fun way to create sound. Obviously you can play around with different types of. Listening, um, different skills and listening, different things. It's really cool. So that one's DJ mode in music FX. So that's like an option.

So again, there's more, I'm sure there'll be more than one episode on this one, but I want to point out, so this is just the labs at Google homepage. That's all I've talked about is the homepage and that's not even all of them. You can click I'm feeling lucky and it'll just send you someplace and then you get to learn cool things.

But if you scroll like at the bottom,

Right. So there's a little pink arrow on the bottom of this screen and the home screen of the home screen. And this then. Like experiment with the future of AI, like there's highlights of different things coming out like January 24th. So it like gives you. Like upcoming or just past, you know, things are on their page, but they have like AI and Chrome and notebook, L notebook, LM, personalized AI notebook career.

So there's like more AI experiments and things like that. So we will talk more about some of these in the future, but just so you know, like as you scroll down, there's lab sessions with teachers that link to their, They're YouTube videos that explain kind of where some of those comes from and, and the different things with Google labs.

So labs, Google labs, not Google, so much fun. And as we loved our Google Chrome experiments, these are going to be super duper fun. And there is so many things. To look into. So we had some pictures and some music ones today. There will be plenty in the future. And there's a lot of AI cool stuff that you might want to dig into.

If you're into finding out new information about different ways to use AI in your life. Yeah, cool. Is that fun? That is fun. Labs. google.

Okay. They're adding to labs. google. Yeah. And it is

Yes. So hold on. Anyhow. Thanks for tuning in. This has been the tech tools for teachers podcast. If you ever have any questions, you can find me on the app formerly known as Twitter. That's Martin WI or on threads or on Facebook. And if you want to get more information on the links to the technology discussed in this episode, you can visit smart and w I.

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