Google Teacher Academy UK 2012: My Reflections and the Future

Earlier this week the Google Teacher Academy ran for a second UK outing at the new London offices on St Giles High Street. It was a privilege once again to have the opportunity to help plan, organise and be part of the 2 days.

50 educators from around the world came together for some rapid professional learning and discussion and the chance to work alongside Google employees to help make change happen in their communities. These are a handful of my reflections about the 2 days and what the future may hold for the event.

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Google Engineers

One of the most unique features of the teacher academy is the access to and contribution by Google product managers and employees to the learning. During our 2 day event we had the chance to spend some time in the company of YouTube, Google Docs and Google+ product managers who joined us for hangouts. The Google Docs team were there in force and shared with us some incredible new features to this ever changing tool. Jeff Harris the product lead for Google Docs document, presentation, and drawing editors did some great demos and talked about the future developments of the tool. It is always exciting to have access to this type of group and have them share their expertise with us.

Google+ Potential

One thing that the GTA did for me was to put the potential of G+ back on the table, not because of any great demo or future road-map session, it was more to do with a group using it loads. There was lots of sharing to just the GTAUK group and so the circles came into their own, I think I will probably spend a bit more time figuring out how best to use it alongside Twitter.

Whoop!

I do enjoy a dose of “whooping” (I suspect you are pleased I didn’t add “cough” to that phrase) to raise the enthusiasm in the room. Don’t get me wrong I am not so keen on the use of the ‘whoop” in cinemas where it doesn’t have much place, but at the GTA the enthusiasm for the learning opportunities we can offer our classes was great. And when you unpick it, that is all it is, an enthusiastic public gesture of our delight for a potential future learning opportunity for our students. Jo Badge describes it as the GTA “philosophy” and in many ways it is important as it kept the energy up – you wonder what the event would be like without the wearing of our emotions on our sleeves. Huzzah!

Reflections from GTAUK participants

Reflections on google teacher academy UK 2012 #gtauk « DrBadgr by Jo Badge.

Learnbuzz reflections on the GTA from Steph Ladbrooke.

Google Teacher Academy: Reflection | Anseo.net from Simon Lewis.

Carry on Learning: GTAUK posts from Sheli Blackburn

The Future of the GTA in the UK

It has been about 5 or 6 years since I began to email Cristin Frodella from Google about bringing the GTA to the UK and it has been great to now see the second event conclude. However this leaves me somewhat pensive about the event over here, the model of organisation and how much more could be done. The bottom line is that I want more of this type of opportunity for UK teachers, not just a few places over the course of 2 years but more like 3 big, full blown academy events every year.

It doesn’t seem that much to ask for UK teachers, who are, in my opinion, one of the most innovative and inspiring communities of teachers in the world. This is what I am pushing for and will do what I can to help make it happen.

74 Interesting Ways to Use Google Forms in the Classroom

The Interesting Ways series of resources continue to grow as the community add ideas from the classroom. Below is one of the most popular with over 70 ideas shared by teachers for using Google Forms in a range of different ways.

Make sure that you explore nearly 40 other crowdsourced resource like the one above – you can see the full series of resources on the Interesting Ways page

Introducing Google Docs To Your Class: Interesting ways to use Docs in the Classroom 3 of 3

This is the third and final part in a short series I am reposting from the Official Google Docs blog which I wrote back in 2008. I introduce people to the concept of sharing ideas in the form of the Interesting Ways resources – both learning about the tool itself and sharing good practice about it!
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The mornings are becoming darker and the leaves are changing colour here in England, the Autumn school term is in full swing. We have been using Google Docs (as part of Apps Education Edition) with a new year group for 8 weeks and we are putting into action some of the many things we learned from last year’s implementation.

Whilst in the previous two posts I have explored many of the broader themes that must underpin the way sharing online docs should be approached in the classroom, I am now knee deep in the practicalities of using Google Docs with our classes. This post will hopefully give you some practical ways to use the tool in the classroom, some inspiration as to where to start and some usage tips that will help it all run smoothly.

Over the last year I have begun two presentations that share practical tips in the use of Google Earth and the Interactive Whiteboard in the classroom. I have set the presentations up so that anyone with a practical tip can become a collaborator by sharing editing rights with them. In this way the presentation expands with the advice and tips from real users and from a much wider audience of educators.

All you need to do is send me your email and I will be able to add you as a collaborator to the presentation, so you can add just 1 or even 10 tips for the use of Google Docs in the classroom. (See details at the end of the presentation)

The first five are my own tips, in no particular order, to get the presentation started. It is currently called “[Insert #] interesting ways (and tips) to use Google Docs in the Classroom” – but I hope that you can find time to add your own and share your advice with Google Docs users so that the name changes! Or perhaps you would prefer to just use the presentation as part of your staff training – it is all licensed under Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial Share Alike 3.0.

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The Interesting Ways resources have come a long way since 2008 – and this one is up to 34 ideas! I hope that you have enjoyed the short series of posts about using Google Docs and managed to take something that you can apply in the clasroom when you are working with collaborative online tools.

Introducing Google Docs To Your Class: It’s about communication, not the tool! 2 of 3

This is the second in a series of 3 posts I wrote for the Official Google Docs Blog – in this one I share some common challenges teachers face when students begin working together on collaborative projects.

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2668173081 b62efb9df5Communication is important, not the tool

The success of our own class projects was not influenced by how well the children could use Google Docs. After all, it is not really about the tool — it’s about the group’s ability to work together as a team. My class found this difficult throughout the year. I did not expect that just because we were using technology that the outcome would be any different. In fact even though each child was engaged with a role within the group and a task to complete, the technology exacerbated the lack of communication. The groups were plodding on with their own tasks and when it buffeted with someone else’s they would get upset. They may be working in the same online space, but that does not automatically indicate they are collaborating well.

With this in mind we raised the profile of the sense of communication within the groups and discussed with the children their teething problems and how we can best resolve them. With every resolution I drew it back to the idea of better communication. The class had a fuller understanding from these discussions of what they were doing when working together in Google Docs and some of the ways that their own communication was causing problems. To reinforce this in future sessions I would regularly stop the class to talk about an excellent example I had overheard from an individual or a group. One such example was when the children in one group lowered their laptop screens so that they could discuss the progress of their work so far. I raised it with the wider group ,we briefly discussed why it was such a good move, and through this we then saw the majority of the groups adopting this strategy.

How student personalities and familiarity with technology affect group work

You know what it is like: you try and balance a team and consider the characters that you put together in a group, but within moments they are falling out! I suppose using Google Docs does not make the task any easier. Out of the 5 groups in my class, 2 worked very well together, 1 was OK and the other 2 had lots of problems and struggled. On reflection, the groups that worked least well together were made up of perhaps 2 or 3 strong personalities that would naturally like to take a lead and this caused conflicts and problems as it has in other activities. When the children have their own laptops and a clear contribution to make within a document, that is appropriately structured, in my experience it can help a group work together.

I had children in my class that were very capable at using technology and were motivated and enthused at its use in our lessons but who often struggled with their literacy or maths, they were more confident when collaborating with Google Docs because of their own personal comfort with technology in the classroom. They pushed themselves forward to take a lead and be more involved when in a more traditional paper-based activity they may not have done. Similarly, the flip side of this is children who are very confident and capable in literacy who perhaps have less confidence when using technology. Even though composing groups within your class to collaborate is similar for any activity, it is important to consider the type of characters who grows in confidence when embedding technology in their learning.

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Next: Interesting Ways to Use Docs in the Classroom

Introducing Google Docs To Your Class: Tips for introducing online collaboration to students 1 of 3

In 2008 I was invited to write a series of blog posts for the Official Google Docs blog. I have decided to repost them here to highlight some of the challenges I faced at the time and in an effort to help you, not only with the use of Google Docs but also other online collaborative tools.

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3068052025 ecfde2145fModelling expected behaviour and good practice first

As our first Google Docs project began to gather pace last school year, I realised that the children were finding it difficult to work together. With hindsight it is easier to recognise that the children were not only being introduced to a new piece of technology (the Docs tool) but also their traditional way of working was to be challenged by the new concept of working collaboratively in an online document.

It was clear that the children were unsure about the way they should be working together. They were each working on their own laptop and it was not the technical side of things that they struggled with, it was the fact they were expected to interact with others in their group as well as use a screen. I found it very useful to model the process. Just as I would if I were showing the children a style of writing in Literacy or a type of stretch in PE. I worked with a colleague on an example document and gave the class a running commentary as to what we were doing. As we worked we talked to each other and I underlined some of the key features of what made that short demo collaboration successful for us.

I think that every class of children will respond differently to the challenge of working together in an online doc, but it proved incredibly valuable to our classes to model what is expected of them. In September, I’ll have a new class and I will be keeping in mind this idea from the outset. Another idea would be to encourage the students to demonstrate the concept to the class – this is much harder to show but valuable nonetheless. I will be planning in time to model the technical and communications side of working together and also reflective time with the groups throughout the project to discuss and review the process of collaborating.

Introducing group collaboration: entire class, working in pairs, and groups of four

With the 9 and 10 year-olds in my classes, I found it valuable to take small steps towards an open collaborative project with 4 or 5 group members. As I introduced Google Docs to the class, we began to work together on documents that everyone could contribute to, revealing the ways that it worked and how it updates. In many respects this could be labelled as modelling the process that the children will in turn use later on. It proved valuable to be able to prove the concept to the children in a simple “step in, step out” controlled type contribution, nothing protracted. We added ideas to a large grid within a spreadsheet, with the children being told to choose any cell to write in – you could also invite them to fill in some information about themselves next to their name in a class list document. This single contribution to a whole class document was our first step.

It was followed by children working together in pairs on one document – a laptop each, sitting next to each other and sharing the document between them both. Finally the children worked in a larger group of 4 in a more lengthy collaboration as part of a Geography project. I believe it is important to progressively build up to bigger group collaboration and for this coming academic year I will be taking the same approach in developing the children’s collaboration experience over the first 6 weeks of term.

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Next: It’s About the Communication Not The Tool