Pack your bags, online educators, because in this presentation, we're Going Google! Google Certified Teacher Wendy Gorton will take audience members on a trip from transforming online learning at her school site and how integrating these free and collaborative tools at their school site can transform learning as well. Participants will benefit from seeing how integrating Google's suite of free online collaborative tools-- Gmail, Docs, Forms, Calendar, and more-- can help enhance instruction, administration, and professional development at their site. Workshop attendees will leave with an online kit of examples and sites as well as a handout as their "passport" for the day, and be encouraged to connect further in the online community via Wendy's Twitter and email to continue the journey.
Participants will see the benefits of integrating Gmail-- for students and teachers-- to help organize and prioritize communication at the school site. She will also highlight the power of Google Docs at the school site level, how administration can collect information and data and classroom observations and walkthroughs with Google Forms, how Google Spreadsheets can be used to analyze higher-level school data, how Google Docs can create and share everything from departmental meeting notes to planning documents for all-school events, and Google Presentations to quickly create and share professional presentations with everyone, and this is just for administration! Wendy will share how teachers can change their classroom environment by creating Collections in Google Doc, sharing docs with students, and students collaboratively editing and turning in their work all via the Docs environment. We will also explore the power of global collaboration-- how students researching about the world can send their Forms and Docs to students in international schools around the world to collect and share data with each other, learning in authentic ways. We'll explore how Google Video can be a protected solution for video sharing at your school site, and how even more tools, such as Google Labs, Google Body, and more can enhance the learning cycle. We'll get our next passport stamp with Google Calendar, an easy way to get your whole school on the same page. Find out how you can create resource calendars, how teachers can share their calendars with each others, and how students learning study and tie management tools by subscribing to calendars and making events and reminders. We'll then dig into Google Sites, Google's wiki answer that allows teachers to create easy websites, technology integrators to create great resource sites, and we'll look first-hand at examples of Wendy's school site transforming the ePortfolio learning process with templates and Google ePortfolios, all of which easily allow students, teachers, and administration to embed rich content and share with each other.Finally, we'll explore Google Apps marketplace, where you can add third-party applications-- many free, like BrainPop, Aviary photo editing, and more-- that are directly accessible to all students, teachers, and administrators on their homepage. We'll end our trip by looking at how the migration process occurs-- how to educate your administration, staff, and community, having focus groups, giving surveys, and then the accompanying professional development plan to help everyone master their new tools. Students and teachers can learn and work with each other anywhere, a boon for international school students and educators, who are often on the go and going to other schools. The best part is, as an administrator, you can pick and choose which elements and at what privacy and safety level you want at each.
As with every great journey, this will be an interactive session that gives time before each tool is presented for workshop attendees to discuss what they currently do at their site for each element, i.e. Think-Pair-Share to discus how teachers and students currently keep track of events at their school site, and what issues/benefits they have with it and then will be invited to share with the group.
Wendy is a Google Workshop for Educators, Google Workshop for Administrators, and Google Apps EDU Certified Trainer Lead Learner and has given hands-on workshops to the power of Google tools around the world, and is a Google Teacher Academy Lead Learner, Sydney, Australia, and Seattle, Washington. Her school site recently migrated to Google Apps from Sharepoint and she is passionate about the learning effects it has had on her staff and students and looks forward to share this with Sloan-C participants. Feel free to check out more of Wendy's work at http://bit.ly/wendysresume!
