High Techpectations

Announcing the First Virtual Summit Featuring Google for Education

Very excited to be developing a new form of Google Summits along with Steve Hargadon and CUE! We just announced to today the CUE Learning Revolution Online Summit Featuring Google for Education. We're hoping to bring the magic of these summits to educators who are seeking more professional development around Google apps, particularly in areas of the US and beyond where access to face to face events is not necessarily practical.

This two day event will take place on September 6 and September 7 from 9 AM to 6 PM GMT-7 using Google Hangouts on Air. Steve Hargadon and I usually run our global ed conference around the clock, and eventually we want to do that with this conference.  However, we're keeping things manageable for our first summit and thus limiting the hours. We do realize this is not necessarily convenient for educators around the globe, but keep in mind that all the sessions will be recorded and available indefiintely. The cost to attend and view sessions is $40 for both days and this includes a CUE membership. 

Google Certified Teachers, Google Education Trainers, and Google Educators are invited to sumbit proposals for this event. Below is a digital flyer that I hope you will pass along to potentially interested colleagues!  

 

Midwest Chromebook Institute #cbiexperience

 

Steps to Mobile Learning Success from Lucy Gray

Breakthrough Learning @Google: Day 1 Video

Get a taste of the Breakthrough Learning education summit that was held at Google at the end of October. I had the great privilege of attending this historic event and I'm glad to see that the ideas discussed are shared this way with the general public. As a friend noted afterwards, this stuff needs to go viral in the way TEDTalks have.

I've been involved peripherally with Google's education efforts since 2006 as a blogger for the Infinite Thinking Machine and as a Google Certified Teacher. It's been exciting to watch their education initiatives develop, and this event was significant as it indicates that Google plans to continue its role in conversations about education at a national level. The fact that both CEO Eric Schmidt and co-founder Sergey Brin addressed this audience was not lost on me, and I can't wait to see what develops as a result of this two day convening of people influential in the world of education.

I love education conferences in general, and could soak up the ideas of others forever, so I enjoyed 99% of the speakers at Breakthrough Learning. I was particularly struck by Netflix CEO Reed Hastings, who apparently really knows education through his involvement with the California State Board of Education and KIPP. He's clearly a brilliant guy who understands that there aren't quick fixes to our nation's educational woes. I also loved NYC principal Jason Levy's story of turning around his school with computers and Google Apps. As one of the few practitioners represented in the speaker line up, his presentation was truly compelling.

Here's the official Google video from day 1. More to come!

 

Also, check out Esther Wojcicki and Jason Levy in these videos:

 

iSummit 2009 - Nashville

I'm in Nashville through Saturday at iSummit, a conference for private and charter school educators at schools with 1 to 1 laptop deployments. I'm really excited to be here as it's my first time visiting Tennessee!

Below are my presos which I've posted in Slideshare. Please feel free to contribute to my Google Maps/Earth teacher meme project and to join our group in Diigo where I will be bookmarking relevant links. Also, consider joining the Google in Education group as well.

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Google in Education Presentation: NLU Symposium Version

Here's yet another version of my Google in Education presentation, slightly customized for a National-Louis University event in Wheeling, Illinois. It's embedded from Slideshare, and you can embed this as well in your web site or download the presentation from Slideshare in PDF form. To make things a bit easier, I'm uploading a PDF copy; many resources cited are not underlined, but are clickable and will lead you to the relevant website. Click here to download the PDF:

Download NLUGoogle.pdf

Lots of people came out to hear NLU prof Randy Hansen give an overview of Web 2.0 applications. I followed Randy and demonstrated some of the lesser known coolness regarding Google products. My favorite things to demonstrate are Google Book Search, adding books to My Library, and finding items in WorldCat. I also love showing subscribing to feeds from Google News and how to collaborate on and edit a Google map. The list could go on and on!

Interestingly, I asked people during the presentation who had heard of Google Earth, and I'm guesstimating that perhaps 15 people out of the 50 audience members raised their hands.  I continue to be surprised by the number of people who aren't familiar with these resources; it speaks to the need for continued awareness raising about the potential power of technology in education.

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NICE Mini-Conference 2008: Google in Education

NICE Mini-Conference 2008: Google in Education

PDF OF PRESENTATION:

Download NICEGoogle.pdf

From: elemenous, 5 hours ago

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A slightly modified version of the Kean preso.There are many links to resources within this doc; make sure you click on things to visit them.

SlideShare Link

Google Scavenger Hunt for Middle Schoolers

I'm so excited about a spur of the moment project I started today in my sixth grade computer science class. We just finished group reports in our millennial/computer terms wiki, and our next topic to cover is graphing. For the past two quarters, I've done a rather dry assignment involving temperatures of cities around the world in Google Docs and Spreadsheets. I decided I wanted to explore an Ogle Earth blog posting forwarded by Chris Walsh to the GCT community, and I began by trying out the Google LookUp formula within Google Spreadsheets. Essentially, you enter certain search terms into this formula, data is found by Google, and entered into the specified cell. See this blog posting in the official Google blog for more information and check out the hunt itself. I need to add more complete directions and polish it a bit, but I may post about this over at the Infinite Thinking Machine when the project is finished. So far, my students' reactions have been really positive... they had no idea about the calculator features in Google Search and many said that this alone would help them with their homework. Another thing to note is a suggestion from my colleague, Marty. She thought it would be great to use autofill with this Lookup formula, to say, find statistics for a set of pro baseball players. Unfortunately, autofill doesn't seem to be a feature with Google Spreadsheets yet!

Friday 5: More Cool Tools

Friday 5: More Cool Tools

Hi Everyone -

In February, I had the opportunity to help with the second Google Teacher's Academy in New York. Along with two other GTA leaders, I participated in a "Cool Tools Duel" in which we presented a couple of our favorite edtech resources. Everyone present then voted via applause for the overall favorite. This activity inspired a long list of other cool tools within the Google Certified Teachers community, and I thought I'd share a few of my favorites this week. The third Google Teachers Academy just wrapped this week in Southern California, so welcome to any new Google Certified Teachers who may have joined the Friday 5!

Enjoy and think summer,

Lucy Gray
elemenous@gmail.com

1) VoiceThread
http://voicethread.com/

This site was recommended recently by my ADE friend, Valerie Becker, and I'm looking forward to exploring it further. At VoiceThread, you upload photos (or directly import them from your Flickr account) and a slide show is created. You then can add audio and text narration, and have others comment on the photos in a similar manner. Check out this document for information on how you can set up VoiceThread to for classroom use.

2) Gliffy
http://gliffy.com/

Here's an online alternative for concept mapping. There are some nice Web 2.0-like features in Gliffy, such as the ability to blog about a drawing as well as to add collaborators to a file. Via Chris Walsh.

3) OurStory.com
http://www.ourstory.com/

Create multimedia, interactive time lines for free at this web site. This is a nice resource for personal use because several sets of guiding questions regarding various life scenarios are presented. For instance, there is a set of travel questions that will lead you to reflect and document on a trip. Via Kevin Jarrett.

4) Math Thinking Blocks
http://www.thinkingblocks.com/

This is an online visualization tool for helping students with math. In the module I sampled, I was given a story problem in which I had to figure out the total cost of two items. I was guided through three steps to solve this problem which included visual guides and feedback. I found this to be a really unusual as well as useful tool for helping students with math. You really need to try this one out!  Via Kevin Jarrett.

5) The Generator Blog
http://generatorblog.blogspot.com/

This was suggested in the GCT community by Alix Pleshette. This blog contains a growing list of web sites in which you can generate general silliness. For instance, you can add your own picture to an image of a cereal box, make a banner for a web page, or create your own customized Hollywood sign. You might want to screen any of the sites listed here first before using with students, though. Some of them do not look appropriate for kids.

To subscribe to the Friday 5 Google Group, visit this page.

NECC 2007 Workshop Resources

Excuse multiple crossposts -

Julene Reed and I are teaching a workshop at NECC on global collaboration, and I've set up a series of resources to demonstrate during this class. I hope that these resources will live on as people become interested in sharing resources used to teach global awareness concepts. Please consider jumping in and joining any of these groups. Some of them are already seeded with material, but others are just getting started. Feel free to pass this info on to anyone you know that also might be interested.

If you are presenting on a simliar topic at NECC, please think about "crosspollinating" material in these spaces as well.

1) Global Education Ning group
http://globaleducation.ning.com/

2) Global Education Flickr group
http://flickr.com/groups/globaleducation/

3) Global Ed Google Group
http://groups.google.com/group/globaleducation

4) Global Education Collaborative Wikispace
http://globaleducationcollaborative.wikispaces.com/

5) I'm tagging any resources I bookmark with the tag globalawareness in Furl and in del.icio.us.

6) Google Calendar for Global Education - enter your NECC global awareness events here, for instance.

If you think of other similar resources we should include, please send me suggestions.  Thanks!!!

Google Spreadsheets Graphs and Charts!

Link: Google Docs & Spreadsheets.

Google Spreadsheets now has the capabilities of making charts and graphs. I just noticed it as am processing student orders for Microworlds software, and am using a online spreadsheet to organize this information. Yay! I wonder how long this has been available...

ICE COLD mini-conference

I'm presenting two session on Google tools at the Illinois Computing Educators' west suburban chapter's mini-conference on Saturday, April 21. Here is a .pdf of my presentation: 

Download lisle.pdf

The Friday 5 Search Engine

I've made a customized Google search engine using sites I commonly use when compiling Friday 5 lists. It's now listed on the left-hand side of my blog along with a box that allows people to subscribe to the Friday 5 in Google Groups. If you ask to contribute to this search engine, you can add relevant sites. It is also possible to add the search engine to your blog, homepage, or Google start page.

I can see teachers using Google Co-Op to make customized engines for various units of study. I think it's a pretty handy way to direct students research instead of just letting them loose on the Internet.

Google Teachers Academy - SoCal

Link: Google For Educators.

The Google Teachers Academy is going Hollywood... well, close... Santa Monica. If you live near L.A., consider applying for the next Google Teachers event which will take place on May 23rd.

Mapping Literary Journeys: Google Lit Trips

There's a new post up at the Infinite Thinking Machine that focuses on the new project of my fellow Apple Distinguished Educator and Google Certified Teacher, Jerome Burg. Jerome has instituted a project called Google Lit Trips, which are essentially guided tours of resources related to books within Google Earth. Check it out and consider making a lit trip of your own to submit to this site!

I have an idea for a collaborative Google Lit Trip that I'll post here later!