Wednesday 15 August 2012

Notes from Google Apps in Edu Day


These are my notes taken at the Google Apps in Education workshop at Northampton Uni on 10th Feb 2012. They are just note form and I'm storing them here so I can find them in the future and because they might be useful to someone else.
The day was organised by Matt Lorentzen (@lorentzenman) and presented by Google Certified teacher Mark Allen (@edintheclouds). The morning consisted of Mark showing us lots of the work he'd done and sharing ideas before a practical session in the afternoon where we got to play.
Notes from AM:
Google glue: looked at communication map within edu and systems for sharing information. Twitter really important in this - develop a pln!
Hierarchy in education =
1. People - Lots of stakeholder groups in an organisation.
2. Information - types exchanged between people
3. Tools and tech - what's used to communicate info
Need to simplify work flow and production environment and connect all communities with an easy user experience.
User interface should be different for different groups - natural place where things come together. Some ideas on Mark's website: http://www.edintheclouds.com/ Find out what's going on in that school. Child friendly, adult friendly, admin friendly, parent friendly. Looked at some different designs. Make things automatically appear on front end, publish once, appear in many places - simplifies process and makes people more willing to have a go. Make front end dynamic - people will have reason to come back. Examples included:
Newspaper built by kids - embedded google pres on website, updated regularly.
Updated photos using picasaweb through Gapps domain.
Design - move away from specific tools on a site and move towards specific learning dispositions?
Mark's school has library full of books, pens, paper, net books, iPads etc. Children make the decision about what they want to use based on what they need to do. Net books have different interfaces, chn not fussed by using Linux or windows.
Google docs with translate tool - send out newsletters with flags to translate, use for parents eve, get parents to collaborate etc.
Google forms - collects responses, show summary of responses, graphs of quantitative analysis
to ICT coordinators - doing things for other teachers tech wise doesn't teach them anything. Need small wins, introduce over time. If people don't want to give up things like Microsoft Outlook or Office then google has plug-ins:
Cloud connect plug in - everything you do in word syncs with cloud
Outlook synctoy, outlook sync for google apps is a plug in
Google hangout with Martin Hamilton
Loughborough uni done a roll out of GApps
Collaboration via docs - can share on different levels. Uni has average of 10,000 ppl using docs every day = big changes to what they expect when they leave uni. Spreadsheets, forms, docs, presentations - lots of different tools. Opening up boundaries for collaboration. What will GApps be able to do in a couple of years time?
More android devices activated each day than chn born - not sure where this stat comes from but wow!
Demo'd chrome book - Citrix receiver built in to run apps.
GApps should be additive. Huge amount for free there to exploit but do need to wade through.
Mark and Martin edit some slides - simultaneous coauthoring, chat bar, comments stream- 3 levels of collaboration.
Core - email, calendar, docs,
The extras apps eg Picasa, google earth etc
Then other things that fit into GApps.
1st thing to do is register a domain and register GApps for education as its free. You can do everything yourself if you can dedicate a bit of time to it.
Mark has created a Getting Started Guide here: http://www.edintheclouds.com/getting-started
Another guide is available from Ian Addison here: http://ianaddison.net/how-to-get-started-with-google-apps-for-education/

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