Google Apps in School – Week 3

I cannot believe that we have already had three weeks of work with Google Apps in our year group. This week has been extremely eventful, and I have loved and hated technology in equal measure (well there is always a bit more love) – with major network issues it has brought into focus issues of reliability that every school and teacher need to engage with when investing their time and effort in Google Apps.

Monday – 12/5/08

• Took some time with the children to explore the various different views and issues surrounding finding and managing Docs home page.
• I emphasised the importance of the search function at the top of the page and how Google have been known to be quite good at searching 🙂
• I demonstrated a few different searches and how quickly you could find content – as you type in the search field it immediately gives feedback on that term, even looking in the people who you have shared the docs with. You can then click the results that popup to go straight to that doc. Very powerful and much quicker than navigating through folders or views.
• As a class we worked together to edit the 1st draft verse we wrote last week. I used the strikethrough tool and colour formatting as we worked on ADDING words OMITTING words and CHANGING words in the poem.
• The alterations the children suggested were excellent and as we finished up I thought that we could use the REVISIONS tool to compare our new version with the original. When two versions are selected and compared changes and deletions are clearly highlighted. If different users were to make the changes than these users are colour coded too with their edits.
• In a less sophisticated way than Track Changes this could be used on a longer piece of work when reviewing 1st and 2nd drafts.
• The children had time together to complete their 1st drafts of the poem and organise their poetry journals (Google Presentations).
• There were a few pairs that had work missing, their poetry journal presentations were missing slides. I pointed them towards the revisions tool and told them to find a version that was complete and to REVERT TO THIS VERSION.
• Although a minor incident this is an example of one of the huge benefits of Google Docs. It auto saves so many times (I keep seeing the “Saving…” message popup at the top on this doc) that unless you were to delete the actual file, a child could retrace every step in the life of the piece of writing, even over a number of days or weeks – not possible in more traditional office applications.

Tuesday and Wednesday – 13/5/08 and 14/5/08

• Oh dear.
• Powercut killed the school server during the night and the APS or alternative power supply did not seem to do its job.
• As a result of this the DHCP database has been corrupted and so the server could not administer new IP addresses to laptops and even the access points. Bad news all round.
• Keith our technician rebuilt the database today (Wed) and tells me it is working again.
• With no wireless network we were unable to access our online docs and so were in a fix – seeing the main concern I have with this approach materialising.
• We were able to continue with our poetry work with some nostalgic pencil and paper writing for a few days! It has brought into sharp focus the main drawback of this method and so I have looked further into the new Google Docs development of using Offline syncing.
• If you download Google Gears, a browser extension, you can sync your online docs with your desktop.
• It seems that this service will be made available to Google Apps Education Edition too, which is good news. But there remains many questions: will children need to work on the same laptop to see their desktop synced work? Could the whole domain be synced to a network? How will this individual use be translated into domain use?
• I hope that when teachers say to me, “But what happens to your access to the children’s docs when the internet connection is down?” I will be able to answer that we will just work on our desktop synced versions which will sync up when we are back online again.
• I would hope that there are no further restrictions to doc access because of the offline nature – for example having to work on a specific machine because docs are only synced there.
• I am hopeful for this situation but expect there may be some compromises – it will be interesting to see how docs could be used offline for a domain.
• On reflection I still have complete faith and trust the infrastructure in place. This event is the first of its kind at school, but we did not lose the internet connection (which, for what it is worth, has been amazingly reliable over the last 5 years or so) it was the wireless network that suffered. If we were to be working on a Local Authority learning platform or other such product we would not have been able to access it either. I will be chalking it down to an unlucky event – and still have full faith in my network structure and reliability.
• Do I have all of my eggs in one basket when using Google Docs? Not really – the writing and poetry language was the focus and that was still focused upon in the days we had no connection. Should you have a backup plan in the back of your mind? Perhaps, there is no harm in it – I usually have something up my sleeve for most things even if it is normal class work and not technology related. Using Google Docs to support your work is no different in my mind.

Thursday – 15/5/08

• Wahey the wireless network is back on its feet – looks like it was a corrupt DHCP database which issues and controls IP addresses. So the old IPs were not being refreshed and nothing new was being issued. Suffice to say it took a 3 hour database rebuild from Keith our technician who drafted in some extra help too.
• Anyway the whole problem has highlighted the need for some sort of backup in the event that it occurs again and, as I mention above, I hope that the Offline – Google Gears development allows us constant access and a possible solution.
• The children were straight back into their writing and we had another great session today with children completing their first verses and editing what they have written.
• Their senses poetry has a simple and effective structure and they have been using Docs tools to help support their work – it seems to have been a successful unit of work. One of the highlights is the poetry journals that the children have created we hope to continue to add to these as we continue our poetry work.
• Google Docs does seem a little glitchy – over the course of the last few weeks I have noticed things that serve to remind me that it is still in BETA. Here are a few:
• The thumbnail view in Presentations is a little odd, more often than not the text appears over sized in the thumbnail.
• Presentations seem to take a long time to load.
• Sometime text behaves strangely in Docs – rigidly holding onto formatting even if you change it, can be frustrating.
• Objects and texts do go missing there has been perhaps a dozen occasions, not just today, when we have had to retrieve an older revision because of missing text.
• As a result of this missing text phenomena I showed the children how to use the Revision aspect of Docs again, reminding them that they can revert to any version right back to the beginning of the Doc.
• As an extension I stopped the children with 20 mins to go and showed them how easy it is to add images to a Doc.
• We used the FlickrCC search tool http://flickrcc.bluemountains.net and I modelled how to drag an image from one window to another and drop it into Docs. We then looked at how to alter the image and move it about.
• We talked briefly about the Creative Commons license and what it meant (need to do more on this)
• Discussed the importance of dealing with inappropriate content (images) and what we should do – I think it is important to keep this sort of learning high on the agenda, so the children understand what is expected of them and how to deal with issues if they arise. It seems to me that this message of appropriate and sensible action should be reinforced throughout the year, not just in a bundle of e-safety lessons.
• For some reason IE shut down or crashed on a child and they were a little perplexed as to what had happened. (Note to self – must install FF so kids have a choice) A huge benefit of Google Docs is that it auto saves so regularly, as explained above. As a result the child was able to log straight back in again and pick up without any data loss. Working on a desktop WP like MS Word (auto saves could be configured – true) there is a higher chance of data loss due to unexplained crashes or application misbehaviour. You can encourage a healthy “save regularly ” culture in the use of desktop apps but nothing comes close to Google Docs saving your work every 70-80 seconds for you. It won’t forget.

Friday – 16/5/08

• During today’s literacy session we worked for approximately 20 more minutes, just fine tuning our poetry journal presentations.
• Children were still finding missing text and a few things different but were independently accessing their doc revisions and switching back to older versions that were complete. Good to see this going on as it is an important feature when editing and writing.
• Yesterday children had dragged images into Google Docs and today they wanted the same images in their presentations. This is where we faced problems but the kids worked brilliantly to work around the issue and solve it.
• Initially I had told them to copy and paste the images across from docs, but this did not work – it allowed you to paste but no image.
• Secondly I suggested finding the image again in the Flickr CC search and dragging it into Google Presentations. Even though they suggest this works, it doesn’t. Or it at least hasn’t for us. The presentation would say it is working – the message at the top of the page would be saying importing image or something similar, but nothing would appear.
• Children suggested we save the image and insert it. So they saved the image to their network folder and inserted and browsed for that saved picture. Not as simple as dragging and dropping but same result and kids happy. Children coped really well with switching from one method to another. Good to see.
• Seems to me that Google Presentations is much more glitchy than others. Behaved quite slowly today and image issue is a little frustrating.
• The choosing of images to illustrate their verses was a good extension activity. The quality of their choices were well justified and added another element to their writing.
• I was delighted to see children who had successfully inserted images splitting off and supporting their peers who had not. That sense that we are learning and exploring together was strong today.
• I demonstrated how to preview the presentation and we talked about the IM feature/backchannel that appears to the right. We talked about ways we could collate feedback about what we can see in this space.
• I began a presentation of our class poetry journal and told the children to go to their GMail and open up their inbox. With the presentation in full screen and the IM window open I copied the URL to share the presentation and pasted it into an email. I asked the children who were signed in (remember the children are working in pairs on docs that are shared between them) to raise their hands and I added their addresses into the email. This was as easy as typing the first letter of their name and finding them in the list. I fired off the email and the children opened it and the enclosed link.
• Note to Google – it would be useful to have an email link next to the presentation URL that auto generates an email to send to contacts.
• I could see from the IM window who had opened it up and joined the presentation – ripples of excitement from the kids to see their names and those of others in the window, they love IM. I took control of the presentation and showed them how I could move the slides on and it will change automatically on their screens.
• Upon moving the presentation on a slide I looked up and saw that all of the 16 wireless machines were responding in almost real time. Very impressive.
• I said a few “hellos” the usual IM stuff and let the kids throw a few messages around. I then drew the discussion back to how we could use the IM chat. The only problem that is apparent is that the resulting chat cannot be archived, saved or copied from the window. It is a flash IM and so you cannot copy text out. Although this IM within the presentation window is really neat, if the chat cannot be saved it is less useful. The alternative would be to create a group chat in Google Talk – I would have preferred to share the URL for the presentation in IM form but we have not installed the GTalk clients yet on each machine and the children have not all started up the GTalk IM in GMail.
• Ideally we could (1) All be part of a Google Talk group chat using Talk client from desktop (2) I would open the presentation (3) Copy and share the URL in the chat (4) Children open to follow, but close the IM frame (5) Feedback and answers to questions I pose could be added to GTalk chat (6) Chat is saved and archived, access it from GMail “Chats” link.
• Note to Google – let us copy or save the chat from Presentations – or merge GTalk into presentations.
• After our, on the fly experimentation with presentations and IM we listened to pairs and individuals present and read their poetry from their journals.
• I found it useful in order to jump straight to the presentation to access the shared Docs from my account and right click the Presentation name- then choose “View Presentation” from the bottom of the list. This bypassed the edit screens.

Overall reflections on Week 3

The biggest consideration for me this week is what do you do if the kids cannot access the internet. Of course we/I/you have been successful working without Google Docs – so we continued on with our poetry in more traditional ways. I am pleased to have thought a little more about the development of Google Gears and Offline Docs for Ed Apps, that could be a very important change in the reliability of this tool. If there are days when the web is flaky – it happens – then children could continue unhindered by this. Is the “All my eggs in one Google basket” an issue that you consider to be an important one to resolve with teachers adopting these tools?

On Friday we explored the IM feature of presentations and I am keen to explore how we could harness the children’s natural understanding of this communication tool in future learning activities. Could GTalk be used to get the children responding to questions at the same time, like we did with the spreadsheets example a while ago? They were so excited by that one activity – if we can just pivot that enthusiasm in the direction of learning. It is a shame the IM in presentations isn’t linked with Google Talk in some way, so that what is added there can be saved and returned to later. I will need to download the GTalk client to the laptops and continue to explore ways that IM can be used. Although I am reflecting on the use of IM within Google Apps, with the GTalk client the IM could stand alone from G Apps and so be embedded within any learning activities taking place on the laptop.

Google Presentations seems to be behaving as the one application that is most in BETA – lots of glitches and missing work issues to try and resolve this week. It can’t even handle images as it should. It feels sluggish when working with it – I hope it improves.

Today it was clear that we are all learning together and I was so pleased to see the children being creative and trying to solve problems with real initiative. They worked well on their own or in pairs and helped each other out, sharing what they have learned or a method just discovered to reach an outcome we are all aiming for. We are learning and exploring together. It has been very apparent that there are maybe 3 or 4 children who are extremely adept at using Google Docs, they offer help to others very willingly. But all the children have progressed so far since not seeing Docs 3 weeks ago – long may our learning continue.