As part of a promotional tour around NZ by Cyclone, an IT hardware and software provider, I went along to Merivale School on Wednesday afternoon to see what the latest and greatest was. It started off well with a free Magnum icecream – much better than a coffee or muffin or cheese & crackers that is the usual fare.
Ed from Google at Cyclone Education Roadshow "tech is not a goal but a means to an end" #gafe #GERNZ pic.twitter.com/pF4WCC8E2F
— Greg Reynolds (@GregReynoldsNZ) October 21, 2015
The presentation had three main speakers.Firstly, Edward Carlson from Google (Aus/NZ) gave an overview of the products Google offers. The three topics were Google Apps for Education, Chromebooks, and Chrome device management. I was interested to learn more about Chromebooks. Although I’ve only seen demo’s, the thinking behind their design makes sense in an educational environment. They are designed to boot in under 8 secs, battery will last a full school day, auto update every 6 weeks, virus free, lightweight OS and perhaps most importantly for schools – low cost ($250-$500)
I was also new to the Chrome Management Console. This allows administrators and teachers to have quite refined control on the use of the Chromebook by students. For example, a teacher can select certain webpages to load on startup, push out Apps and folders of bookmarks, to the usual setup and maintenance of the device.
Also of interest was Google Expeditions. This was launch earlier this year and seems more developed with more places to virtually go to. It is designed to work with the Cardboard headsets and left me thinking about the opportunities for use with my class. One idea is in the Ancestry unit, students can build a virtual tour to further add to their story of their ancestors migration.
The next speaker with Saunil Hagler. An ex-teacher, he now works for Cyclone as a Digital Learning Specialist. His part was going over some tips and tricks in the GAFE ecosystems. Some tips I picked up were:
- VideoNot.es: a Chrome app that lets you make notes while watching a video.
- Explain Everything is now in the Google Apps marketplace
- Google Dictionary extension: look up and define words on any web page.
- Read&Write for Google Chrome: a Freemium extension that does text to speech (including in Google Docs)
- Google Drawing: you can make objects into a clickable link before inserting them into a Doc or Site (see this example).
- Make a document a copy by changing the last 4 letters in the URL from ‘edit’ to ‘copy’
- Have students add their revision resources as a post on an ‘Announcement’ page in Sites. Tag appropriately so other class can easily find and use them.
- Classroom: can have classes for different groups within a class (i.e. one for each of the 6 maths groups in my class.)
- TPACK: The point is that we teachers usually have great pedagogical and content knowledge, but usually don’t have great technological knowledge.
Next was Greg Reynolds who introduced himself as the Google Education Evangelist @ Cyclone. He didn’t speak for long – only to say he was available to help schools with anything Google.
The last speaker talked about a product that helped monitoring student use of devices. From time to time when I suspect a student is off task I ask to see their browser history – this can reveal a pattern of a student not being focused on a set task. Another way is how you physically set up your class – an easy solution is to have the teacher desk at the back with the student screens easily visible. Also, just wandering around the class can help you monitor what students are doing (although they do have some cunning tricks of quickly switching before you arrive). The product was called Linewize. This product offers a way to make it easy to monitor student use (check out the demo video)
Overall, a worthwhile afternoon where surprisingly I was among 70 odd teachers but only one of a few (or maybe the only) secondary teacher. Come on secondary teachers – pull your socks up!
