Get Healthy With Google

Last week the Official Google Blog ran a blog post about how many Google apps and services can be used to support and promote healthy lifestyle choices. The suggestions include using some of these Chrome apps to track what you eat, record your exercise habits, and to find healthy foods. If you don't want to use an app, you could create a Google Form for recording your eating and exercising habits. I use Forms on my Android phone quite a bit.

Applications for Education
Reading Google's post about using their services to help you get healthy prompted me to think about using Google Apps in health and physical education courses. Challenge your students to see how many miles or kilometers they can cumulatively walk as a class in one week. A shared Google Form is a great place to log that information.

Ask your students to try healthy snacks in lieu of junk food and record those changes in a Google Form. Use the Google Search tools for food data to compare the calories and carbohydrate content of the junk snacks with the healthy snacks. Then at the end of the week tally up the data in the shared Google Form to see the cumulative effects of making healthy snack choices. If you're looking for a tool that will encourage students try healthy snacks, check out Chew or Die that I reviewed last week on iPad Apps for School.