Stressing about education...

...of our 4 month old little monkey.

Seriously, I have been stressing about this for a few days. Since we don't know where we are going to be living in: T-Minus 2 months, the prospect of a future, and hopefully semi-permanent, home is a little daunting. Especially with the future educational implications it carries with it.

We have thought about home-schooling are and huge supporters of it. The Mama Bear in our family is a little intimidated by the idea. So option two would be a home-school group or independent Catholic school. Well, where do those exist?

I am a fan of the most local (formally independent) school here: Holy Rosary Academy. So, how do you find a school like that?

Well, you could go to the National Accrediting Organization that they belong to: National Association of Private Catholic and Independent Schools. There are a couple of good ones back in Michigan... not really in the areas we want to live. (Funny enough, there are a few in areas we USED to live.)

What about an area that has a great Catholic High School? HRA is on the Catholic High School Honor Roll. There are a few schools in Michigan that are on there, but again, in more heavily populated areas - but these are more mainstream schools, which means mainstream problems.

So... I am trying to take a breath and realize that we have a good 4-5 years before we REALLY have to worry about this. I am just concerned that if I am this stressed now... who KNOWS what 2015 will bring. I hope my wife doesn't read this...

Working on a more collaborative writing process with Google Apps Edu

While feedback and revision are crucial steps to successful writing, it’s not always easy to do in practice. Keeping track of revisions, deciphering edits, and arranging reviews can keep us from repeating this editing cycle more often.

The collaborative nature of Google Apps can help evolve the writing process with easy sharing and anytime, anywhere collaboration. Add in built-in reference tools, autosave and revision history, and ready-made templates, and Google Docs – part of the Google Apps suite – becomes a powerful platform for writing.

We’ve developed our first Google Apps Topic Review to highlight some of these features and stories from teachers in the classroom, and we shared and revised this paper using the same principles of collaboration.

If you’re attending this year’s ASCD Conference (held from March 6-8 in San Antonio, Texas) we invite you to hear presentations from Google Certified Teachers, Google Apps Education Edition customers, and Google Apps Education team members about other ways Google Apps can help in the classroom. View our teaching theater schedule and stop by to visit us in Booth #626.

For more information about how to start using Google Apps Education Edition at your school, visit www.google.com/a/edu

Posted by Dana Nguyen, Google Apps Education team

Improved Gadget Administration in Google Sites with the FSCT

Thoughts on History and the "Important Questions"

Following EduCon, readers on Will Richardson's blog voted on several questions that we might deem the "important questions" regarding education today. The top ten being:

1. How do we support the changing role of teacher?
2. What is the role of the teacher?
3. How do we help students discover their passions?
4. What is the essential learning that schools impart to students?
5. What is the purpose of school?
6. How do we adapt our curriculum to the technologies that kids are already using?
7. What does and educated person look like today?
8. How do we change policy to support more flexible time and place learning?
9. What are the essential practices of teachers in a system where students are learning outside of school?
10. How do we ensure those without privilege have equal access to quality education and opportunity?

This is an interesting list and it  especially interests me in terms of a common thread through the questions, namely: the intersection of identity and purpose.

The first two questions clearly have to do with the identity of a teacher. What is it that a teacher "does"? And how has what a teacher "does" changed/is-changing? Historically, we might say that teachers generally "do" three things. They impart wisdom and offer systems of understanding -- I'm thinking Plato and Aristotle as well as the Classical Raga gurus. They also serve society by preparing citizens for the demands that work and service will put on them -- here we have the teacher of "skills" whether we talk about the Medieval Guild system or elements of contemporary public education. Third, we have teachers as the generational constituents of the transmission of ideas, arguments, and concepts -- and here I see the Rabbinical tradition as a rich example.

As for the question of how to support the change that teachers are going through, I'd first suggest we define the change itself. More often then not, education finds itself in the position of responding to rather than initiating cultural change. This makes sense, given that so much of what we do in education is in using historical precedent to help students develop ways of knowing. All the more important then that in this era of rapid change, we should not forget that our educational predecessors have long grappled with societal paradigm shifts.

In fact, I would make the argument that a rather good way to consider the questions raised by the Weblogg-ed readers is through the lens of historical analysis. For these are important questions; they are questions dealing with the fundamentals of identity within an era of dramatic shift. And for that reason, we should look back into dramatic shifts in history and examine how -- or whether -- education itself rode out those storms.

Over the next few months, I will be examining the historical nature of shift and the way in which education has responded to it (or how it has occasionally shaped it). I started generating a list of ideas this morning, and have already found some interesting parallels. For instance, at the same time that the experiment in democracy is occurring in 5th century Athens, the leading ethical philosophers of the age are making arguments against what had become a tradition of hawking educational ideas and rhetorical constructs for cash in the Stoa. Later during the Roman Empire, education becomes a commodity somewhat reflecting imperial values as well as turning certain locales into what we might call the first "college towns". In the wake of the decentralization of Roman governmental authority in the early Middle Ages, education becomes (literally) cloistered in the abbeys; five hundred or so years later, the universities arise with Latin as the lingua franca and a new class of intellectual elites that even later, with the rise of dialectical theory, will begin the movement towards educational celebrity as professors become seemingly as important as their disciplines and education again becomes peripatetic. In the Renaissance, we will see the further societal split in the intellectual tradition with the Guilds taking the arts and the private tutors of rich aristocrats taking the humanities. All this leads into the greatest pre-Industrial shift since the Agricultural Revolution -- the development of the printing press and the rise of the literate masses.

In short, the history of education is a history of responses to cultural shift.

Which means that the history of teachers is a history of responses to shifting demands upon identity.

How did the identity of teachers change through each of these shifts? Is it too much to think that our own era of digital shift is not something new, but rather the next phase in an ongoing process of historical dialectic? Is it even worth it to think in these terms? Or should we be focusing on the day-to-day work of "changing" schools?

Well, in my thinking, the questions raised by the readers hit on big themes: identity, passion, essentiality, purpose, adaptation, environment, and exclusivity. If I can play one small role in this conversation, I'd like to be the historian. I'd like to help give context to each of those big issues from an historical perspective, not in that the history itself will necessarily change what's going on in the day-to-day, but in that closer examination of the history might help us think about how we are answering the questions.

Many of us in education -- myself included -- tend to be pragmatists; we work with what we've got, and for the most part theory and history are often a diversion rather than a primary function within our practice. We talk about practice and policy in the story of "now" and we work scrappily to make things happen in the "now". And that's fine. But it leaves me personally feeling that the work of education all too often is forced to exist within the confines of politics and finances rather than in the sphere of the re-enchantment of the spirit where it belongs.

And for that reason, I'm very excited to be one small part of this broader conversation on the "important" questions -- as well as the importance of having questions -- that the sphere of educators revolving around the new digital paradigm brings to the debate. And I'm happy to put on my historian hat and I invite anyone interested in looking at the historical currents arisen by these themes to get in touch; let's think together and write together. Do our small part to help create a substantial context for the discussion.

Our Future

Yesterday, I had a really great idea for a post, but then I had to do other stuff and I forgot what I wanted to blog about. So now you get to read about something likely just as important.

I recently got involved in my parishes youth group. It is one of the better "organized" ones that I have seen. (although, I do admit that I have not seen that many) The parish is very willing to get kids involved, and has many monetary and property resources to do so. For example, the kids have access to a nice gym, a "game room" as well as class rooms, computer labs, and social halls. That's not to mention the fact that they can have access to the church when they want for prayer.

Despite all that, there are still things holding the youth group back from what it really could be.(phenomenally great) A lot of that has to do with the fact that there just aren't that many Catholics that want to be involved in youth group. Compounding the issue is the fact that for some of the well-meaning adults that get involved don't know much more (if anything) than the kids.

These problems stem from way back (the long-time Bishop in my diocese was nationally outspoken for things like women priests, protestant-esque churches and the like). So many people that grew up here never had the faith formation that they really deserved. Now with people living such busy lives, they don't have the time to go to classes to learn how to minister properly to our youth. Now, with two great Bishops in a row (maybe we are making up for other "deficiencies"?) the diocese has put together all sorts of opportunities for the faithful to properly learn their faith and spread that faith to our youth.

My role so far has been limited in the youth group. I have more or less simply been an adult figure that has a little more knowledge than what these kids are used to. However, with the opportunity (that is, as long as the parish priest decides that is the capacity he would like me to undertake) to obtain a deeper understanding of the faith, and more young adults that want to be involved in these kids' lives and faith formation, I feel that the youth group could become something more than just a better atmosphere for kids to get together, but a solid foundation to shape their lives and carry out the faith.

So my question is: what do you feel makes a youth group great? Is it deep discussions about the faith? Or maybe trips to see seminaries? Time for prayer in front of the Blessed Sacrament? Let me know how you think our future needs to be shaped.

Posted by: Brian

Make Active Patience a Habit of Life

So often in the discussion of ed tech integration -- and perhaps especially so in the discussion of bringing social media into the classroom -- teachers who consider themselves savvy in this digital age become frustrated with those who would rather not change their habits of teaching.

This frustration is understandable, but it is nonetheless unhealthy.

In my experience, the majority of teachers and admins opposed to social tech integration are those for whom social media itself has not become a habit of life. It is not that they are inherently 'against' whatever it is that social media suggests; if anything, they have so little understanding of it in the first place that 'engagement' is moot.

But engagement is the key. For engagement is active involvement; it is the truth of social media that often lies obscured by so much of that in the blogosphere and twitterverse that is banal and petty. We here in this conversation often tend to think of SM as fundamentally 'good', but a quick stroll through the comments on YouTube readily suggests that labels such as 'good' or 'bad' do not apply so easily to the Net; and perhaps we are better off gauging our critical eye towards modalities of static vs. dynamic, engaged vs. disengaged, active vs. passive. Certainly, the way in which we choose to describe what we find online tells alot about our own personal experience within the digital realm.

Now let's consider that admin who has heard some good things about social media, but who for several reasons resists allowing access in the classroom. Let's think about that teacher who by all regards has led a distinguished career, but who sees the current trends in ed tech as just another in a long line of educational fads. Let's think about the young teacher who can't wrap the mind around the idea that the same platform one uses to have a laugh with friends can be used to educate children.

How do we engage these folks? How do we get them to 'buy in'?

The traditional route in schools has been for those in charge to tell those on the ground that they are going to buy in. There is no choice: buy in or perish.

This route, however, is the source of so much frustration, anguish, and rough rivalry in education. It is all about power -- and the resulting friction is a source of untold amounts of unnecessary negative energy.

The second route is for those in charge to allocate limited control to committees with the charge of leading the parade. The problem with this admittedly very common solution is that it creates -- at least in the minds of many of those outside of the circle -- a minor hierarchy. Frustration therefore is directed towards the minor hierarchy, which by definition has only the most limited control and is therefore rendered passive by the negative energy directed towards it.

And so, we so often find ourselves in situations where stasis is tolerated in the name of definitional workplace satisfaction.

And so often with regards to ed tech and social tech integration, nothing gets done and no one understands why.

Well, the 'why' gets back to the very first point, namely: the majority of teachers and admins opposed to social tech integration are those for whom social media itself has not become a habit of life.

Without social media being a habit of life -- not unlike reading a newspaper or writing a letter have long been worthwhile and generous habits of life -- it will not be internalized. A operator within the realm of social media who has not internalized it as a habit of life will be as successful at understanding social media as an illiterate is at understanding a newspaper. Even less dramatically, consider the Op-Ed pages of your favorite paper. Given your familiarity with a given columnist, you may or may not truly be internalizing -- and thus understanding -- what is being said; but if the columnist is unknown to you, you may have more difficulty grasping certain habitual nuances of a given argument.

In other words, if you ain't a regular reader, you may not understand what all the hub-bub is about.

The same goes for social media.

In light of this, it should appear rather obvious to us that the best way to go about invigorating your faculty with the engaging values of social technology is not by some hamfisted top-down approach, nor through committee-level prognostication, but rather by allowing individuals themselves the opportunity to let themselves buy in.

And how is this done?

We so often think of 'patience' as a form of waiting. We are 'patient' when waiting in line at the supermarket; we are 'patient' when sitting in a traffic jam at rush hour. This type of 'patience' is passive; it is the patience of not being in control.

But there is another form of 'patience'.

There is the form of 'patience' that we need to exhibit when teaching a small child how to throw a ball. There is the 'patience' needed to get a bill through congress. There is the 'patience' of opening oneself up to one's inner feelings through meditation or prayer or ritual or deep thought. These are active forms of patience; they are forms of patience that are active complements to the will. The purpose of being patient with a child is to teach it. The purpose of being patient in legislating is to get the legislation through. The purpose of being patient in the approach to inner understanding is to manifest that which is within.

And it is that sort of patience -- active patience -- that should guide our thinking in making manifest our desire to get a whole faculty to 'buy in' to the full integration of tech and social media.

What does this look like at the practical level?

The key to becoming immersed in social media lies in the individual interest of a given person. While Teacher A may be an excellent history instructor and Teacher B may be a seasoned math teacher, in the life that exists outside-of-the-classroom the former's greatest passion may be for modern dance and the latter's for jazz. Rather than bring them together and try to get them passionate about using social tech in their classrooms, demonstrate to them what resources are available out there in the world of social media and then let them use it to pursue their own personal interests.

Let them experience the joy of discovering what social media has to offer them rather than telling them what a joy social media is.

Down the road, help teachers with similar outside interests start Delicious groups and write collaborative blogs. Give them time during the school day to collaborate on outside-of-school projects and encourage them to use the resources of social media to bring those projects to fruition. Re-allocate your scheduled meeting times and resource many of the mundane functions of faculty meetings to the Web and instead hold faculty meetings where you give teachers the floor to give presentations on the things they love outside of school.

This is all part of the method of active patience.

By letting teachers use social media to explore their own interests -- whether or not those interests are 'directly' related to school -- you will foster a culture that fundamentally understands and values the resources of the digital age. The 21st century faculty will create itself.

Just be patient.

Response to Questions About Education and Obsolescence

An anonymous reader left the following comment regarding the post '21 Things That Will Become Obsolete in Education by 2020':

Ok, so why should I even bother going to school? If I can learn from my house what is the point? You think kids who don't do their homework in the first place are going to take advantage of the broken barriers between home and school? Socializing is more important to most high school students anyway. Teachers will NEVER become obsolete! We will always need those positive role models and leaders in our society. Why bother studying if I can just go to Wiki and look up anything I want? What's the point of learning everything we do in school and being tested on it later if I can access the same knowledge at anytime? Why educate doctors if anyone could diagnose you based on the symptoms wiki has to say?
Do we seriously want a generation of kids who can't even print their own name on paper? This whole advancement in technology is sounding very scary to me. We can't operate our world with the touch of a button because what happens when that button fails, when the system has a glitch, when the satellite didn't receive necessary information, when we have lost data? Computers can't take the role of people because people are not programmed.
I believe that technology has many incredible purposes and we should utilize some of them but when we start to become dependent or let it control the way we live I think we have a problem. For example, I probably used spell check 10 times in writing this, and what has that taught me? Using technology in a balanced way is the only way it should be used.

Signed... A concerned student

While I generally refrain from responding at any length to comments submitted anonymously, I do wish to take a closer look at this reponse point-by-point and respond in kind.

1. Ok, so why should I even bother going to school? If I can learn from my house what is the point?

The point is that that is the point.

You can learn from your house. Or on the light rail. Or at the library. Or in a restaurant. Or in line at the grocery store.

You can learn anywhere.

And you don't learn in school just because it's a school. In fact, as we all know, there's plenty of 'not learning' happening in school buildings.

As the decade wears on, students (and teachers) will have more choices. And we'll have ever more opportunities to be learners.

2. You think kids who don't do their homework in the first place are going to take advantage of the broken barriers between home and school?

We have to get away from the idea of 'homework' altogether.

We have to address the fact that reading a book for class does not necessarily make you 'learn' better than reading the website of your choice. Completing math problems in a textbook does not necessarily make you 'learn' better than playing an MMOG.

Teachers have an obligation not to dictate what content is best for their teaching, but what content is best for the learning of each student individually.

Sound difficult to pull off?

Well it is.

But that's the challenge.

3. Socializing is more important to most high school students anyway.

Yes. In fact, socializing is important to everyone regardless of age. We are social creatures.

Remember that old quote from Aristotle? Humans are political animals. Well, that's not really the best rendering of the Greek. What Aristotle really meant was: Humans are civic animals. We live in communities. We are inherently social.

That's exactly why social media is so powerful. Because it extends community beyond the borders of place and State.

What we are all learning now is that we can harness the power of these online communities to functionalize learning in ways Aristotle only could have dreamed of.

In the future -- if not now -- learning itself will be primarily a form of socializing. In a way, it always has been.

4. Teachers will NEVER become obsolete!

It's not really a matter of whether teachers will become obsolete; it's a matter of whether the institutions that currently support learning will become obsolete.

And they will.

Just as they did when the Academy was closed down. And when the abbeys were replaced by universities. And...

The point is that individual teachers will either adapt or die. That's a brutal fact of history.

5. Why bother studying if I can just go to Wiki and look up anything I want?

That's a great question. And I'll answer it in two ways.

First, ask yourself what your purpose in studying is. Are you trying to memorize facts for a test? Are you trying to build what teachers call your 'prior knowledge'? Or are you using the act of studying to further your skills of analysis and evaluation?

Given your answer to those three questions, there are a variety of reasons why you would want to go to the wiki.

The other way of answering: if your studying can be accomplished merely by looking something up on the wiki, then you are not really learning anyway. You, as a student, should either be demanding of your teachers or of yourself higher standards of intellectual discovery.

6. What's the point of learning everything we do in school and being tested on it later if I can access the same knowledge at anytime?

First, refer back to my answer to #5.

Then start to question the authority of the person assessing you in this way.

But don't do it rashly. Think it out. Think about what 'being tested' really means. And be honest with yourself about what your learning and understanding mean.

7. Why educate doctors if anyone could diagnose you based on the symptoms wiki has to say?

Sources like the Mayo Clinic online and Web MD aren't there for the education of doctors. They are there for the education of patients.

We are living in an age in which the resources are available for individuals to educate themselves about issues directly related to their lives.

That doesn't make everyone an expert. But it does make the society as a whole more accountable.

8. Do we seriously want a generation of kids who can't even print their own name on paper?

There's a good chance that we're currently raising the last generation in human history that will use paper.

9. This whole advancement in technology is sounding very scary to me.

Yes it is. Just as it always has been.

Travel back in time and ask the hunter-gatherers about it.

Sometimes the most important things are scary.

It's scary to graduate into a Recession-lined job pool. It's scary to have kids. It's scary to live on your own. It's scary to move to a new city.

That's life.

10. We can't operate our world with the touch of a button because what happens when that button fails, when the system has a glitch, when the satellite didn't receive necessary information, when we have lost data?

Systems have been failing long before the advent of digital technology. Read up on what happened to Harappan society. Read up on what happened to the ancient Mycenaeans. Read about the many 'Dark Ages' and periods of chaos and illiteracy that cloud great swathes of human history.

If anything, the multiplicity of culture and data in the current climate make that sort of doomsday scenario actually a little less likely.

That said, surely there will come a day when all of this changes. But it'll likely be a gradual change: more an evolution into something else than a sudden jolt. It won't come with the press of a button.

But who knows.

11. Computers can't take the role of people because people are not programmed.

There is an argument to be made that industrial/institutional schooling has been 'programming' people for generations.

12. I believe that technology has many incredible purposes and we should utilize some of them but when we start to become dependent or let it control the way we live I think we have a problem. For example, I probably used spell check 10 times in writing this, and what has that taught me? Using technology in a balanced way is the only way it should be used.

Technology has always influenced the way we live.

A campfire is technology. The wheel is technology. So is an MRI scanner. And a space telescope.

Technology lets us do things in new ways. And once we experience a new way -- or a better way -- of doing something, we tend to go with it. It's the process of innovation.

As for what spell check taught you, it matters little to me. Because what matters to me most is the fact that you were able to contact me with your ideas. What matters to me is that you sparked my thinking. And I appreciate your comment and the comments of so many of my readers for doing exactly that.

In a way, spell check didn't 'teach' you anything; rather, it just helped facilitate your ideas.

That's sort of what a good teacher does.

Free Thinking (as free as walking down a sidewalk)

Today starts the first of a series of Wednesday guest posts written by TeachPaperless readers.

And I'm happy to introduce Dan McGuire as the first guest blogger.

Before becoming a Minneapolis elementary school teacher, Dan tried his hand at poetry; he also spent about twenty years peddling lobster boats, packaging, computers, and telecom gear in regional, national, and international markets.

You can read more of Dan's thoughts about education on his blog; and you should follow him on Twitter: @sabier.

Free Thinking (as free as walking down a sidewalk)

A few years ago, when the city of Minneapolis was entertaining proposals for a new public wifi system, one of the vendors that submitted a proposal offered to give free wifi access to the Minneapolis Public Schools in return for letting the vendor mount their nodes on the school buildings that 80 years ago were scattered strategically all around town (too many of which are currently being sold off way too cheaply).

That possibility wasn't acted on; it was a dream that didn't come true.

But, it was and still is a very real possibility.

Broadband/wifi doesn't need to cost public schools a dime. It could and should be free.

Free text messaging is already a possibility that could become a reality if only we insisted that that's the way we wanted it to be. Providing text messaging costs the telecom carriers nothing, zero, nada. We're simply allowing them to charge us to use something that should be as free as walking down a sidewalk. I wrote a blog about this last summer.

Ira Socol , Will Richardson, and lots of other folks are talking about the day when schools decide to quit wrestling with the horse and instead decide to jump in the saddle start riding this bronco.

I mean: let kids use phones, or whatever, to communicate.

We already know how to manufacture enough of the devices, and the means of connecting doesn't need to cost anything. The biggest hurdle is deciding that we want to participate in the future instead of the past. It's about as hard as flipping a light switch and turning on the lights.

Once we make the decision, we'll need to do some more dreaming and questioning.

That's when it gets fun.

The future of networked and mobile environments is in the questions that teachers ask, and in our persistence in asking them and taking stabs at answering them and refining the answers and asking more questions.

Call it the Hypertext Socratic Method, or get seriously academic and go with Punya Mishra's TPACK. I personally like the 21st Century version of John Keats' Negative Capability theory: the ability of "Being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts without any irritable reaching after fact & reason."

John Dewey would be with me on that.

Because the future of education is not about things or even the way things are connected. As my friend from down under, Tomaz Lasic says, "This is not about computers, this is about people."

People and the questions they ask, I'll add.

I first ran into Tomaz when I had a question about how to do something with my Elementary Math, Science, and Writing Moodle site. I went to what has become for me a trusted source of knowledge: the Moodle Community Forums. Tomaz is a champion on the Moodle forums. He's been offering guidance and advice to students and teachers for years.

Tomaz's video on how to set up a Moodle database for students (Tomaz calls it the Moodle Swiss Army knife) was one of those "OMG, this is really cool" teacher moments. (Though I still don't get why someone would be that interested in water polo, but I guess living your life upside down on the bottom of the planet does things to you. And even though there's a fourteen hour difference in our clocks, his students were making similar comments about us when they got a glimpse of my students playing American football in the snow at recess this week.)

The future is not some new app, or even a new uber-theory cooked up by a guru followed by thousands of people on Twitter. The future is all of the new PLNs being created, FOR FREE, by teachers and learners all over the planet, on their own time. The future will look something like the kind of professional development being created by Nellie Deutsch and her friends at Integrating Technology.

They're doing it with class, passion, and grace: FOR FREE.

I passed up an invitation to spend an hour or so with some clicker vendors and a famous writer of books about education on Monday because, well, I don't like fighting for parking downtown at rush hour -- especially with 2" of fresh snow and temperatures hovering around 3 F.; that and I really wanted to go to my kid's basketball practice which I hadn't watched or helped out with for a couple of weeks.

As it turned out I didn't get to see much practice because I got drafted to make a delivery from the team to the food shelf and I had to shovel that two inches off my corner lot sidewalk. One way or the other, I learned more after basketball practice by spending time clicking on Twitter links from my PLN than I would have with the vendors and the writer.

(Now, if the someone had offered to chip in for a nice dinner and cover the parking and maybe toss in a little PD stipend, the decision would've been a little tougher; but basketball would still have won.)

Ultimately, I'd like to see education not be a market. When I moved to Minneapolis they gave me a library card FOR FREE. Well, my students and I need information access to wifi and texting, too; they're today's libraries.

Access is the sidewalk to the future. And it should be as free as walking down a sidewalk.

Connecting Google Apps Education Edition with Blackboard

Editor's note: George Kroner is a Developer Relations Engineer for Blackboard, a company that focuses on transforming and improving the educational experience at over 5,000 institutions worldwide. Through the work of Blackboard’s community of over 1,000 educational tool developers, George sees many opportunities where Blackboard’s and Google’s open platforms can be paired together to provide better and more productive teaching and learning experiences.

Thanks to George for sharing these outlooks.

Technology has the potential to transform the educational experience and to connect students, instructors, and researchers in new ways. We think it's critical for schools and institutions to expose learners to these tools and practices to impart information literacy skills required to succeed in their careers – as students and beyond.

Sharing a strong belief in the power and possibility of open platforms, Google and Blackboard have recently teamed up to combine our platforms, and we wanted to share a few powerful examples of these integrations with you here.

Enhancing collaboration in the classroom. Earlier this summer, Northwestern University took the lead on developing a way to facilitate classroom activities by letting instructors embed Google documents, spreadsheets, presentations, and calendars into Blackboard course sites. Individuals enrolled in Blackboard courses are automatically added as collaborators to these documents, and single sign-on capabilities allow documents to be accessed without logging in twice.

A recent student newspaper article details how these new capabilities are being used in courses ranging from foreign language to world history enabling new models of academic collaboration and assessment. What Northwestern has accomplished exemplifies one of the best recent examples of tying together the unique capabilities of Google Apps for Education and Blackboard Learn.

Now, more than ten different institutions, Google, and Blackboard meet on bi-weekly calls to regularly discuss the future of the Bboogle project. Northwestern has also made this Blackboard plugin available through an open source educational tool community called OSCELOT for other clients to download and contribute back to.

Enabling coordinated collaboration. As part of a class project at Penn State University, a team of students examined ways to improve their online learning experience by integrating Blackboard with other systems. After some analysis, their top recommendation was to develop a solution that combined events from their multiple school-related and personal calendars into a single location.

By integrating with Google Calendar, they were able to create a Blackboard plugin that combines events from Google Calendar with academic course schedules, assignment due-dates, and group meeting times from Blackboard. Their plugin was also made available as an open source project at the end of the semester. More details, including user documentation, are available through OSCELOT at this link.

Connecting researchers where they teach. The London International Development Center was formed to connect researchers from the University of London's six Bloomsbury Colleges. Its mission is to find ways to solve complex problems relating to international development by bringing together scientists from interdisciplinary backgrounds. By creating a Google Spreadsheet that integrates behind the scenes with the familiar Blackboard user experience, the LIDC provided a way for researchers to search and connect with each other by name, college, and research interest.

Facilitating new ways to communicate. Google Wave represents a new way to approach group collaboration and communication, and thus the potential for impacting education using such a tool is significant. Imagine creating a course assignment within Blackboard that triggers a contextualized Wave of thought and conversation that can react to changes in course content within the LMS and relay thoughts and comments from subject matter experts around the world back into an assessable course discussion forum or blog.

Today we invite you to join a discussion of how you think Wave should be used to enhance educational experiences. Log into Wave and click this link to post your thoughts, then see your comments show up within the discussion forum in this Blackboard course.

The examples listed above are just the beginning of what's possible when combining the power of the Blackboard and Google platforms, and we salute the institutions that are on the cutting-edge, creating these integrations.

– George Kroner, Blackboard Developer Relations Engineer

Posted by Gabe Cohen, Google Apps Education Edition team

Words in color- Novel approach to literacy

We all know that educational centers have their own criteria and methods of teaching but here i bring you a new challenge approach towards teaching and learning, for the betterment of teachers, parents and students. It is called as Words in Color which is an approach to learning to read, write and spell. The approach focuses, first, on people and their natural capacities to learn, and then on the subject matter. Have you heard about it? It's a whole new view to education and literacy. This type of approach has already been used in several educational center's like schools, home schools etc. It was conceived of technical understanding and doesn't hide difficulties in English, but triggers natural capabilities that enable learning. In short, just a part of a skill that masters the skill of reading which includes Phonological awareness, Decoding, Fluency, Comprehension, and Vocabulary.

The company is passionate about moving towards creating awareness of education to eliminate illiteracy and they are motivated to bring reality out of this approach.

Take a look at the overview-
The English alphabet has 26 letters, yet we use more than 26 sounds in our speech. In fact, American-English speakers use 59 sounds, and there are often many ways to spell the same sound – sometimes dozens of ways. This is very confusing for beginning readers because letters only show how a word is spelled, not how it is spoken. We have identified all 400+ sound-spellings in American English and organized them into 59 distinctly colored groups. With color, students can see how a word is spoken, and more quickly become aware of the nature of the written language.

One can purchase this product from the stores online and make literacy a dream come true throughout the nations. You could also gift out this product this Christmas and show someone that you care. You can stay motivated and be a part of this movement to create aware of the effectiveness of this approach. Isn't it the best thing you can do to improve education in the universe? The best gift during Christmas am sure :-)

The Sound of Memory: Using Audio to Spark Learning

Next Tuesday will mark the 29th anniversary of the death of John Lennon.

Stumbled across this most unique document of that night on YouTube. It's a recording of a scan through the radio airwaves of NYC on the eve of the 8th of December, 1980.

Long before the advent of the mainstream Internet, we (likely as a whole species) have had this innate desire to record things. Scribes, redactors, editors, painters, printers, photographers... recordists all.

Personally, I've always been most in-tuned with audio recording.

I try to bring as much audio into my classes as possible. As a Latin teacher, you might think that I'm talking about a lot of pronunciation and recitation; but no, I kinda find a lot of that stuff to be a bit boring. When it comes to bringing audio into the class, I'm talking about using archival material; obscure pop songs; speeches; sound effects; and the sounds of real places, real people, and real things. I'm into bringing these things into the realm of my students' awareness and using them to catalyse new investigations, new discussions, new understandings and realizations about whatever we happen to be studying in class.

Folkways offers a number of interesting environmental recordings that can spark interesting discussions about sound, technology, memory, and the stuff of history; check out Sounds of the Office, Sounds of Medicine, Sounds of the Junkyard, and the mind-blowing Sounds of Insects.

If it's voices and real-life stories you are looking for, check out the website of the Third Coast Audio Festival. I've used their '99 Ways of Telling a Radio Story' to inspire my kids to write; and their podcast called Re:Sound is top notch.

They've also got an English language version of Peter Leonhard Braun's 'Bells in Europe' which, in telling the story of how the Nazis melted down bells to make weapons, is one of the most powerful and celebrated radio documentaries of all time.

And if you are looking for more info on good audio and striking radio, you might stop by KFAI Minneapolis/St. Paul's Listening Lounge blog. Their little list of links is essential.

Back in college, I fell in love with the 'little stuff' of art history. Sure, there were the Raphaels and Van Goghs, but I remember my favourite two museum-bound items were a little 16th century salt and pepper shaker set and an elegant ancient glass urn.

Relatively anonymous things. Relatively random.

But precious. And full of meaning.

It's like that with audio, too. A snippet of conversation or the reminder of a sound we haven't heard in some time can lead us into new investigations, new discussions, new understandings and realizations.

And so next Tuesday, I'm going to start our Latin III class with a listen to the Lennon/NYC recording. We're studying Horace right now -- the original 'carpe diem' guy. We've been talking a lot about what it means to express the things you hold in your memory; and we've been talking a lot about why art and poetry are such powerful and memorable forms of expression. We've been talking about why poets are remembered. We've been talking about the lyric of memory.

So, we'll listen. And think.

Who knows what kind of conversation it might spark.

Progressive Education from 60+ Years Ago

The words of John Dewey, still relevant:

"The world is moving at a tremendous rate; no one knows where. We must prepare our children not for the world of the past, not for our world, but for their world."

That's the basis of my idea of education.

Gone Google at EDUCAUSE 2009

According to the newly-released 2009 Campus Computing survey statistics, 44% of colleges and universities have converted to a hosted student email solution, while another 37% are currently evaluating the move. Of those that have migrated, over half — 56% precisely — are going Google.

Since this time last year we have seen lots of exciting growth for Google Apps Education Edition. We've rolled out more than 100 new features, launched free Google Message Security for K-12 schools, integrated with other learning services such as Blackboard and Moodle, and have reached well over six million students and faculty – a 400% increase since this time last year.

The Google Apps for Education team celebrated these big changes with Apps customers – including students – and conference attendees last week at EDUCAUSE, an important annual gathering for higher ed IT. Here are a few photos:

Read more about EDUCAUSE and our exciting year of change, and be sure to visit www.google.com/appsatschool to learn more about how your school can go Google.

Posted by Miriam Schneider, Google Apps Education Edition team

Twitter Lists: EducationPLN

I'm liking the new List feature on Twitter. Really makes it easy to follow different segments of your Twitter crowd.

I invite all of our TeachPaperless subscribers to join the EducationPLN List; I think it's really going to turn out to be a great resource for prof development, networking, and teacher camaraderie.

Join and Tweet!

best,
Shelly


ps -- Do note that @TheJLV -- a teacher, Yanks fan from NYC, and member of the list -- is currently live-blogging the MLB World Series... so there are quite a few Tweets describing pop-ups and line drives.

Just don't get yr hopes up thinking our list is all major league baseball all the time ; )

My (Current) 19 Favorite Education Blogs

I read a lot of education blogs. And from all corners of the ed spectrum, both in terms of policy and instruction. Here's a list of the folks currently topping my blogroll; these are the ones I make sure to keep abreast of post-by-post.

Subscribe! Enjoy!

1. Andrew B. Watt's Blog: Watt is the Jon Krakauer of the new paradigm in education. He's a writer who sees both the beauty and the danger inherent in our expedition into the digital mountain ranges. He's honest and and critical and he writes about this stuff with a poet's knack for succinct detail. Strongly recommended.

2. Free Technology for Teachers: Byrne publishes a mind-numbing plethora of tools for teachers on a daily basis. Here's a recent -- and representative -- highlight entitled 'Beyond Google'.

3. Moving at the Speed of Creativity: Wes Fryer's work is always a substantive treat. His recent posts from China have been eye opening; especially his recent post concerning proxies and web filtering on the Mainland.

4. Dangerously Irrelevant: One of the standards by which a blog should be measured is the extent to which it galvanizes conversation among its readership. With his merging of singularity theory and ed leadership, McLeod never fails to catalyze discussion.

5. Sustainably Digital: This is a new blog that I've been following ever since reading a great post there on Super Mario and the Scientific Method. Good stuff; will be following this one with much interest.

6. Concrete Classroom: Michael Kaechele never fails to prove that a true teacher is always an artist of learning. Check out his students' recent work with Lego Robots.

7. Open Thinking: Alec Couros' blog is where I go when I'm itching for new ideas. And, we once had a Twitter conversation where somehow we (or at least I) confirmed that the future of education had something to do with Holodecks. How cool.

8. Ideas and Thoughts: Shareski is a generous blogger. His posts, Tweets, ideas, and thoughts have kept me up way too late on way too many nights thinking about the present and the future of education.

9. elearnspace: With Siemens, it's all about the links -- nuggets of information for your perusal and debate. An elegant blog.

10. Digital Education: Where Ash and Manzo demonstrate that mainstream ed journalism ain't all bad.

11. Magistra's Musings: I'm sure I'm not the only educator who really came to realize the power of Twitter through Mahoney's work; and with the wiki she's created to help teachers harness the power of a Twitter network, I doubt I'll be the last.

12. The Fischbowl: Fisch is a legend. Perhaps you knew.

13. SpeEdChange: From the 'constantly challenging your preconceptions' department, Socol is probably my favorite blogger. His recent work on Twitter as Liberation Tool should be required reading in every ed school in this country.

14. Nashworld: Nash is a one-man instructional make-over machine. Check out his 'Four Pillars of Technology Integration'.

15. 21st Century Learning: Nussbaum-Beach is an ed blogger always bringing provocative ideas to the table. Her recent post on Digital Education and the 'Fabric' of Community is one such post -- full of important questions.

16. EducationalInsanity: Somebody, please tell Jon Becker to blog more.

17. The Edublogger: Sue Waters regularly posts on issues specifically related to the concerns of blogging educators. Great information from a great educator.

18. Weblogg-ed: Often stunning posts by Richardson. Definitely a source of frustration in the ed tech community is the fact that we can't force Will to blog several times a day.

19. Design 4 Learning: When a guy who writes a post like this calls you an educational anarchist, you know you're doing something right! [BTW, originally this was a list of '18', but I thought you all needed a little something 'extra' in your lives... enter Dean Groom.]

This list is in no way meant to be inclusive of all that's out there. As I said, there are a bunch of blogs I read that I don't mention here. But as for what's been topping my blogroll recently, this is it.

Please do subscribe to these, and please leave ideas for blogs I should be checking out!

An EducationPLN Twitter List for You!

I've started an EducationPLN Twitter List and I invite you to join.

Lists are the new thing on Twitter; they give members the opportunity to set up interest-specific networks and I think they are going to prove rather helpful as we move forward in demonstrating the value of social networks to our admins and policy makers.

So join in, and welcome in advance!

(Note: these lists are still in beta form, so if you have any problem adding yourself to my list, please let me know and I'll add you).

Young Teachers Speak Out on Social Tech in Education

Just finished teaching a fall semester course on Paperless Classrooms and Social Tech in Education. And I can't help but say that I was completely moved by the experience of watching young teachers go from social tech newbs to PLN-building professionals.

I'd like you to hear what they've had to say; so over the next couple weeks, with their permission I'll be re-posting some of their thoughts and observations about being a young teacher lucky (or unlucky) enough to have been thrust into the digital revolution.

First up is a piece by @JefeGORavens, who incidentally has become a regular contributor to #EdChat:

This is a collection of quotes that I have heard myself, that I do now say, and that I look forward to saying in the future.


Where I was:

"Twitter? What the.....? Hell no I ain't freakin' tweeting and twitting or whatever. Do I look like Ashton Kutchner?"
"Diigo? What the freak is a Diigo? That sounds like some Star Trek vehicle!"
"I now have a blog. Great. I feel like a 12 year old girl with boy problems. Maybe I should start writing in my diary again."
"When is this guy going to understand, I am a simple and basic guy. I can't be tweeting until dawn, diigoing up a storm, and then weeblyin it out all weekend. I need some air!"


Where I am now:

"Seriously dude, I really feel like this stuff is the future. We need to start doing this with our students."
"I know man, I thought twitter was for celebrity stalkers too, but now, I realize that my twitter account is the best PD I have ever gotten."
"#EDCHAT is amazing. In the span of 2 hours I get ideas for the classrooms, best practices, worst practices, ideas for bettering the school, links to websites, and support. In 2 hours of PD, I normally get tired, bored, and frustrated."
"What the.....? You're not on twitter? How do you expect to run for office, when your PLN doesn't even exist!?!"


Where I will probably be in the future:

"Okay estudiantes. Log onto my blog to find the conversation I posted. I want you to find the 5 mistakes in the conversation, and then create a new blog post in your own blog that lists all 5 mistakes."
"Principal Powell, I would love to give a demonstration at tomorrow's PD on how to use twitter and blogs and pixton effectively!"

I look forward to sharing the voices of more young teachers both in favor of and critical of social media in education.

Faculty and staff are going Google, too

September was a big month for Google Apps Education Edition as everyone headed back to school. When we announced five million active users in early September, we didn't expect that it would only be about a month before we would announce that more than six million students, staff, and faculty at schools worldwide are now actively using Google Apps at school.

We talk a lot about what students want and need (and we also try to learn from them as much as possible), but it's important to remember that these six million users aren't only students – they are also faculty and staff members using Google Apps technology in education.

The cloud is all about collaboration, and this means not only students working together, but also students working with their teachers and professors to improve learning outcomes and save time. Using internet-based solutions like Google Apps to enhance the cycle of lesson, evaluation, and adjustment can shorten what used to take days or weeks into minutes, and collaborating in the cloud helps educators connect more effectively with students.

There are lots of examples we're seeing crop up on campuses. For example New York City's Intermediate School 339 ensured clear communication between students, teachers, and the community by moving the entire campus to Google Apps, and taking advantage of features like forms in Google Docs to create real-time quizzes helped to double Math performance scores, increase attendance, and build student engagement.

And, after Boise State University migrated their 2,400 faculty and staff to Google Apps, not only were they able to foster better collaboration between students and staff, but they reduced costs for IT infrastructure, support, and maintenance by $90,000 annually.

Other schools that have chosen Google Apps for their faculty and staff include Temple University, Columbus State University, Abilene Christian University, Macalester College, Manhattan College, Mary Baldwin College, Northeastern State University, and Saint Louis University (including 8,500 staff from their Medical Center and Hospital).

We strongly believe that when all education users - from students to professors to school administrators - have access to cloud-based tools and aren't limited by where or when they work, it enhances their ability to communicate and collaborate effectively. So come on, Go Google and join these schools (and many others) in the cloud with Google Apps.

Posted by Miriam Schneider, Google Apps Education Edition team

Learn more about what's possible for your school with Google Apps Education Edition.

Reader Responses

In response to my call for reader input, here are some of the responses:

Reader Elise:

I follow you because I feel like the Elementary students that I work with are heading to a paperless system. I struggle, however, with how to balance their need to learn to read and write with books and paper with how to read online and type in the digital age.

I would love to hear more about how teachers might move to less paper at the elementary level.

Reader D.:

I'm interested in many things but especially how to entice the technophobes to march with us in the parade.

Reader Heather:

The tools have not been difficult; in fact, I love them. However, joining the conversation has been challenging for me.

Reader Foxdenuk:

Wondering if there is anything that you can find in books which you can't find on the Internet.

Reader Erik:

The process of getting students to listen to each other, even with tools like edmodo and google docs, has been my challenge.

I'll keep these comments in the front of my mind as I blog over the next week. As always, thanks for the discussion! Blogs without reader input and response aren't blogs; they're vanity mirrors.

You all make this more.

Clarkstown Central School District designs collaborative curriculum with Google Apps

Editor's Note: We're pleased to welcome John Calvert, Technology Learning Facilitator and Google Certified Teacher from Clarkstown Central School District, as our guest blogger today. Calvert's post describes how his district has created a collaborative curriculum portal for teachers using Google Apps Education Edition. You can also read or download a case study about Clarkstown Central School District's full Google Apps deployment.

As in most districts, the Clarkstown Central School District curriculum is a living document. We tweak our maps each year, based on student and teacher experience, but communicating these changes to our 800 teachers has always been a logistical nightmare. Even though we have a web based mapping system, our faculty often worked from old copies printed in binders. For most teachers this was the easiest way to work and there wasn't a compelling value add from the old mapping system to change their practice. Google Apps has added this incentive by helping us create a space that is collaborative, purposeful, and always current. The result is a change that has connected our teachers to the map and each other.

Clarkstown Central School District is a central district pulling students from several communities located 20 miles north of New York City. We have 14 schools, ranging from kindergarten to twelfth grade, employ roughly 1700 people, and educate nearly 10,000 students. The district has made a recent commitment to prepare our students for the technology rich future they will inherit. We decided that Google Apps would be a key tool to leverage this goal. We wanted to extend past the tech savvy and tech willing teachers, to the users who would not be your typical technology teachers. We needed buy-in from teachers and administrators to make sure a roll out of this scale would be successful.

With this in mind, we decided to use something of real value to our community - in our case, a curriculum resource portal that was created with Google – as the first step in transitioning toward a new technology platform.

We introduced Google Calendar first because it was easiest for the majority of users to understand. The big desk planners teachers are familiar with do not facilitate collaboration with colleagues and can only be used when you're literally standing in front of them. Google Calendar solved these common teacher problems.

We also created centrally controlled calendars that teachers could add to their own, making life easier. Then, we created curriculum scope and sequence calendars. This let, say, a 5th grade teacher turn on the curriculum calendars and plan lessons for the month based on where they should be in the curriculum. Clicking on a curriculum event provides and overview of the content and a link to the resource site page for that unit.

Each curriculum area for each grade level has a resource site organized by unit. The unit pages are linked to the appropriate calendar events in Google Calendar. These pages display the curriculum which is fed directly from the mapping software. The pages also organize links, documents, and other resources. Some documents are shared across multiple grades and units from Docs. When the original is changed, each linked unit updates automatically. Other sites are created to support professional development in the district.

Most importantly, teachers are now creating unit plans and other resources collaboratively using Apps; these contributions are also shared in the resource sites.

So far, the project has been a resounding success. We started with the elementary curriculum and will be expanding the project to the secondary grades this year. The initiative has "won over" our administrators and teachers. Our faculty is more connected to the curriculum than they have ever been. The work we have done has inspired many of our teachers to bring Google Apps into their teaching. In response to this enthusiasm, we are introducing our Student Apps portal this Fall.

If you'd like to hear more about how K-12 school districts like Clarkstown Central are using Google Apps to save IT resources and encourage district-wide collaboration, please join us at this upcoming webinar:

Google Apps Education Edition at Maine Township High School District
Tuesday, October 6, 2009
11:00 a.m. PDT (GMT -07:00, San Francisco)

Have questions for the Maine Township and Google Apps teams? Submit them here.

Posted by Dana Nguyen, Google Apps Education Edition team

Learn more about what's possible for your school with Google Apps Education Edition.