Google

Google has revamped its site for educators, creating a redesigned repository for all its educational tools and resources for teachers, schools, and students.

The newest feature is News and Calendar, a listing of all events and deadlines for Google’s education endeavors.

Google also created an online booklet called Google in Education: A New and Open World for Learning, which lists the company’s initiatives and programs within the education realm, such as the Computer Science for High School program — university-created workshops for local high school and middle school computer science teachers teachers.

“We’re hoping educators will use this year-round for ideas on how to enhance teaching and learning,” said Google spokesperson Rachel Durfee.

And for those who jumped on the Google+ bandwagon, a specific Google+ page for educators.

The main Google in Education link offers much of the same content as before, but it’s better organized and redesigned. The Teachers site leads to Google’s many apps that can be used for teaching specific subjects, as well as design and collaboration tools. It’s divided by K-12, higher education, and examples of how education systems across the country are using the tools. The site also offers a list of professional development links, including webinars, online workshops, and tutorials, which are primarily centered around Google products and services. The Student Showcases link lists student-created material, such as worldwide panoramas using Google Earth and Sketchup models of homes, towns, and robots.

Schools and districts can find links to YouTube for Schools, which allows students to access YouTube EDU while blocking non-educational videos; App Engine, which hosts school web apps on Google’s system; and Google Apps for Higher Education, a free suite of hosted email and collaboration application.

For students, the site offers a list of awards and competitions — think YouTube Space Lab and Google Science Fair; programs like Summer of Code, which offer stipends for student code developers and Computer Science Summer Institute for high schools seniors about to start college; tools like Google Apps for Students, like Google Docs and Gmail; and Google tools, which include every app and tool the mega-search site has created.

Apps and software is one thing, but the company’s hardware is also making its way into more schools. Last week, Google announced that three school districts in Iowa, Illinois and South Carolina are using only Google Chromebooks, the Web browser-based laptop, and that hundreds of schools across the country are deploying them in classrooms — a total of 27,000 in the hands of students.

“Students love the tablet. I am not going to hide that from you,” said Diane Gilbert, an English teacher at Kelly Mill Middle School in Blythewood, S.C., who’s taught with tablets in her classroom in a recent CNET article. “My goal is to have students publish their work–create and publish. The [Chromebook] is more alike to a laptop or a desktop in the ability to publish.”

Chromebooks are set up to use the Google Apps and other software found on Google’s Education site.

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Disrupting the entrenched education system is daunting. There are 7.2 million teachers in the U.S., 76 million students, and more than 98,000 public schools, according to a government census (as of 2008).

So what’s the most effective way to unshackle the current archaic system from ineffective tactics that no longer work in the digital age?

Google, the world’s go-to for answers, has an idea for the most impactful place to start. Last week, the company’s educational overseers organized the Google Faculty Institute, to which they invited the faculty from California State University (CSU) schools of education. The mission: to show those who teach teachers the most effective, useful, and helpful digital tools.

Why the focus on CSU teachers? Simple math — 60% of teachers in California and 10% of teachers in the U.S. — are trained through the CSU system.

“We want to make California a model for the rest of the country,” said Maggie Johnson, director of education and university relations for Google. “We wanted to find a mechanism for talking about education technology and all the ways of using it in transformational ways — not just ways to support teaching as it’s always been done.”

Over the course of three days, the 39 attendees — mostly faculty who teach at the CSU schools of education — were tasked with coming up with proposals that would demonstrate the use of technology in new and inventive ways. They had to show how the proposal could be scaled and how it could go viral. For its part, in addition to hosting the event and providing experts and resources at the workshop, Google will donate $20,000 to each group, which has six to nine months to implement their ideas.

Here’s what they came up with:

• The Math of Khan: Documenting, testing and disseminating the process by which a teacher can flip their classroom using Khan Academy videos.
• Making Teachers ‘Appy’: Encouraging a “maker” philosophy with pre-service educators (teachers-in-training) by teaching introduction to programming in an educational technology course.
• Birds-Eye Detective: Teaching pre-server educators how to use Google Earth, Maps and fusion tables in the context of project-based K-12 instruction.
• Team-Teaching Classroom Innovation: Identifying a large number of pre-service teacher pairs to develop technology-rich science and math modules, test those modules in their classrooms and share with each other.
• Transforming STEM Educators: Delivering short workshops on how to use technology to do formative assessment, while saving faculty significant time.
• Examining Climate Change: An integrative math/science/technology approach to learning about climate change by developing a module for a methods course showing the power of technology in the context on relevant issues and to address misconceptions.

For these educators of educators, learning the tools of the trade for themselves deepened their understanding of how they can be taught to their students, and in turn used more fluidly in classrooms across California.

“They now understand the ability to manage some of these tools that can make teaching more fruitful and more exciting,” said Jaimie Tasap, Google senior education manager.

Though there were “bumps in the road,” namely legitimate obstacles that faculty would face in taking these ideas back to school to implement, Johnson said she’s confident they’ll follow through.

“We want them to influence the rest of the faculty at their schools,” she said. “You get the attention of hundreds of these faculty members, then you make a real change in California.”

Flickr: jlongstocking

Summertime is typically spent unwinding, unplugging, and for many educators, untangling from the daily rigors of teaching. But summer is also the perfect opportunity to get more familiar with ideas and tools that might take time to understand and use during the school year.

We asked a few teachers how they’ve been spending their summer months to get inspired. We heard from educators from Alaska, Utah, Puerto Rico, Georgia, and California.

• PLAYING WITH TECH TOOLS. “This summer I’m playing with many of the tools we want kids to use more of next year – things like ShowMe and InClass, as well as other apps for the iPad, iPod, and iPhone. I’m also experimenting with more Google apps for learning, trying to get more paperless for next year. I’m reading up on many ideas that others have tried to help incorporate mobile devices and social media into classrooms and do so in a way that is safe but engaging to kids. I’m looking at more ways to ‘flip’ teaching so class time is more productive. Finally, I’m hiking, biking, and having lots of fun so I am refreshed and ready to go back!” – Debbie Brewer, Math/Science teacher, Lumen Christi High School, Anchorage, AK

• FINDING THE BEST HISTORY VIDEOS. “I took a few weeks to just relax and then spent the last month rewriting my course to get it how I want it for next year, making sure I make all the changes necessary to make it better. I also watch a lot of history videos. I watch them and I’m like, ‘I love history! History is so great!’ I want to make sure every student loves it, too.” – Jennifer Klein, World Civilizations teacher, Open High School of Utah

• READING, REMODELING, RECHARGING. “This summer, I went to Dallas, Texas and traveled alone by trains and buses to find my way around. It was a first experience for me since I have always traveled in my own car since I was 16. Reading everything that falls into my hands has also been a worthwhile experience this summer. I read Cutting for Stone by Abraham Verghese. Excellent reading! I have a stack of books waiting for me for the rest of the summer. I’ve also started to knit and looked into every nook and cranny of my house, cleaning, discarding, refreshing things. I’ve made dozens of plans to remodel the living room, renovate the terrace, and paint the house in the next two weeks. These four simple things have done wonders to refresh and relax me for the incoming semester.”  – N. Vargas, 7th grade English teacher at an all-girls’ Catholic school in Puerto Rico

• MAXING OUT SOCIAL NETWORKING TOOLS. “We’re already using Twitter, Facebook, and Edublogs in our course since we went almost totally paperless last year. This summer, I’m using Poll Everywhere during my professional presentations so I can try out their real-time response tracking. Students can respond via weblink, Twitter, or SMS text. Now Poll Everywhere even allows you to download the Flash version of your slide for use with Prezi, so it’s a slam dunk for me and my students since we use Prezi far more than PowerPoint. In fact, we pretty much only use PowerPoint to make slides that we’ll import into a Prezi. LOL.” –  Shekema Holmes Silveri, AP Literature and AP Language teacher, Mt. Zion High School, Jonesboro, Georgia

• TAPPING INTO THE GREAT TURNING.“This summer, I have been spending a lot of time educating myself about the concept of ‘The Great Turning.’ Essentially, it speaks to this point that we are at in human and environmental existence where almost all of our major systems are in decline. It poses the decision that we must make to either let things decline as they have been or act as ‘midwives’ birthing into life a new way of relating to each other and the environment. Three major sources for this research have included the work of David Korten (who wrote the book, The Great Turning), Joanna Macy (and her workshop series and subsequent articles on “The Work that Reconnects”), and a wonderful organization called Generation Waking Up who use the concept in their interactive, multimedia, youth activist workshops. As the global issues teacher (education for global citizenship), a constant challenge is for me to simultaneously raise awareness of the devastating effects of our current systems without overwhelming and dis-empowering my intensely compassionate students. I am incredibly excited to bring the concept of ‘The Great Turning’ into my classroom as a source of hope, that although things look bad, there are an enormous amount of people working across borders and through barriers to take us to a more just and sustainable future. – Emily Zionts, Global Issues and Peace Studies teacher, The Woolman Semester, a semester program for juniors, seniors, and gap year students

Teachers, we’d love to hear from you: What are you doing to get inspired this summer?

Apple also introduced a new product, iCloud that will store users’ music, photos, apps, calendars, and documents online and then push them to all Apple devices, whether they’re iPhones, iPads, iPod Touches, or Macs. The service includes 5 GB of storage for free.

Apple is hardly the first company to make a foray into online storage. But with the popularity of Apple’s products — with consumers in general and with educators in particular — it may be that Apple’s new offering will help popularize the idea of cloud computing, a term that’s familiar in tech circles but still unclear to a lot of consumers.

CEO Steve Jobs took to the stage at the World Wide Developers Conference on Monday to explain Apple’s new service, saying that iCloud was the company’s “next big insight.” Contending that the PC is no longer the “digital hub for your digital life,” Jobs predicted that with iCloud, the company will “demote the PC and the Mac to just be a device” and instead that our digital hub will be “in the cloud.” And if nothing else, iCloud offers a way to demonstrate what cloud computing means: it’s online storage, accessible anywhere from any device over the Internet. All that data will in fact be stored in massive data centers instead of locally on your hard drive.

But what does iCloud mean for education?

Syncing information across devices has great appeal. It means that students and teachers will be able to access their documents, their projects, their videos anywhere, whether they’ve created them at home or in the computer lab or on their mobile phones.

But the major problem with iCloud is that it works only with Apple products. If you use a Mac at school but have an Android mobile phone, or if you use an iPhone but have a Windows computer at school and a Mac at home, then syncing isn’t so seamless. iCloud doesn’t really fulfill the promise of “access anywhere.”

Furthermore, along with the need for people to move their own data across their personal devices, people are increasingly needing to share this information with others. Google Docs and Dropbox, for example, have both seen widespread adoption in schools because of the ability to do just this — collaborate and share — without a restriction on device or operating system.

It may be that Apple has more in store with its iCloud product that will make it better suited for education. The company will have to do precisely this if it wants to be able to compete with other major technology companies that have already made advances on this front, such as Google Apps for Education or Microsoft Live@edu.

Schools are increasingly recognizing the cost savings and efficiencies associated with cloud services (no need for maintaining district servers, for example). But schools should be wary about vendor lock-in here and about selecting cloud services that restrict rather than open the possibilities for collaboration.

Google’s new Chromebooks for Education program will offer these devices to schools for $20 per user per month. This service will include enterprise-level support, device warranties and replacements, and hardware refreshes upon contract renewal (every three years). Included as well is a cloud management console that will allow IT administrators to remotely manage users, devices, applications, and policies. Although the price tag for these devices may not seem like a huge cost-savings — equipping every student with a laptop for the school year is always an expensive proposition — the ability to bypass software licensing, the promise of a virus-free device, and the power to control all these devices and their various permissions remotely all make this a very attractive deal for schools that are interested in one-to-one computing. And as the hardware will work well with Google’s Apps for Education productivity suite, the program means Google can offer schools both hardware- and software-as-a-service, eliminating a lot of the need for schools to build out their own IT infrastructure.

But regardless of whether Chromebooks are a good deal for schools and whether or not schools can afford such an offer, there are other concerns that schools will have to face.They’re not just financial issues, but technological and cultural ones as well.

1. What’s Your Acceptable Use Policy?

The Chromebooks will have the option for 3G and for wireless connectivity. The 3G will, of course, require more expenditure. But either way, handing students a device that is, in Google’s words, “nothing but the Web,” will force schools to consider what their Internet Acceptable Use Policy looks like. The Chromebooks are designed to give students 24-7 access to Web technology — both at school and at home.

The administrative panel for the Chromebooks will give schools the ability to lock down access to some applications — so that kindergartners, for example, don’t have e-mail access while middle and high schoolers do. And Web filtering at school does restrict access to certain sites. But 3G can bypass that, as can Internet at home.

How do schools address acceptable use of Internet resources when a device that’s assigned a student goes off-campus?

2. What’s Your Internet Infrastructure Look Like?

Is your school ready for every student to have her or his own device connected to the Internet? Can your bandwidth — wired or wireless — handle it? As nothing is stored locally on the Chromebooks, students will have to have reliable access to their files that are stored in the cloud. Google does say that it plans to add offline support for Gmail, Docs, and Calendar this year. But a Web-centered machine will require the Web for everything, and spotty and sporadic Internet access at school will be a problem.

3. Who Will Pay?

In the recent SpeakUp 2010 survey, 67% of parents said that they’d be willing to pay for mobile devices and for associated data plans for their children if they knew these devices could be utilized at school. While certainly the $20 per student per month fee will add up quickly and may well be beyond most schools’ budgets, schools may want to consider alternatives to funding these projects. Will parents be willing to pay all or part of the fee?

Will schools be able to use the Chromebooks and online resources to replace textbooks, as well as other tools like calculators, paper, projectors, etc.? And will this in turn free up other funds that could pay for Chromebooks?

4. Are Your Teachers Ready?

Successful one-to-one computing initiatives aren’t as simple as just passing out devices to each student. One-to-one computing requires rethinking how instruction happens, how resources are accessed and allocated. Are your school’s teachers ready for not just one-to-one computing — a huge shift in itself — but for one-to-one computing that’s solely focused on Web resources? Are you using Web-based applications, for example? How much does your school rely on software installed on machines, and can you make the transition to other online tools instead?

5. Do You Trust Google?

Schools that join the Chromebooks for Education program will likely be (or become) Apps for Education customers. This means that schools are handing over much of their IT — hardware and software and email and storage — to one company. Of course, many schools already have this sort of relationship with another technology brand, Apple.

Educators and parents, what are your thoughts on Chromebooks for Education?

Flickr: WilliaC

• The Sesame Workshop and the Joan Ganz Cooney Center released its study on children’s media usage. Among its findings, television is still popular, but children are engaging in a variety of other media platforms. Almost 25 percent of young children under age 5 use the Internet at least once a week, and just under half of those under the age of 6 play video games.

• The social learning platform Xplana released its report on digital textbooks in higher education, calling the industry at a tipping point and contending that by 2015, one out of every four textbooks will be e-books.

• Google rolled out some changes to its Google Docs enhancing its collaboration features. Google Docs has allowed comments for almost a year, something that makes the apps great for classroom – for teachers and for students giving feedback. This week, Google expanded those comments into “discussions,” making them editable, making them appear in threaded conversations, and letting collaborators use the @ symbol to refer to each other by name. Google Wave lives on!

• A complaint was filed against Northwestern and New York University, charging that the schools’ use of Google Apps for Education violated the Americans with Disabilities Act. According to the National Federation of the Blind, Google’s educational suite is not fully accessible. Google has responded saying it has “a strong commitment to improving our products,” but the company did not offer any details.

• Microsoft released an update to its video game development platform for kids, Kodu. Kodu is an icon-based development environment, requiring no programming skills but teaching some of the basics of computational thinking and used to build games for PC and Xbox. Microsoft also announced the Kodu Cup competition for students age 9 to 17.

• A new education-focused startup incubator launched this week. ImagineK12 will provide a 3-month accelerator program, with funding and mentorship, for early stage ed-tech startups. Founded by startup veterans Geoff Ralston, Tim Brady andAlan Louie and modeled after the very successful Y Combinator program, ImagineK12 aims “to effect positive change in the K-12 education space.”