Google Apps for Education Summit, Bahrain, Day 2

A couple days late, but I had to share what I learned at the Google Apps for Education Summit, Day 2. I loved this conference with so many people from so many schools and places!

I was looking forward to the second day, even though my thoughts were with the Accreditation Steering Committee team from my school, which also met today. I had to miss it, but I was not disappointed to be at the Google Summit!

Ben Friesen‘s keynote was as captivating as yesterday’s by Mark! It was so inspiring. It just made me want to keep on creating, annotating and sharing.

The first breakout session, however, was a disappointment. Really, I should learnBen Collage to just not take a chance on vendor sessions. I was sitting in the front row, excited to learn how to use the reading and writing app I had downloaded the night before. However, then I learned that we have to buy a license to use it. I guess the version on my computer is a 30-day trial. I wasn’t enamored enough with the demo to even want to buy it.

The next two sessions I attended were by our keynote speaker–Ben Friesen. One session was using Google Drawings and the other My Maps.

In the first session, we worked on a collaborative drawing of the 1980’s with Ben. It was fun, and, if you click, you can see the messiness of large group collaboration. Then he demonstrated some of the features we can use. A few new features I learned:

  1. There is a red snap-to grid to mark the center of the canvas. That is handy.
  2. You can  connect box lines to group the boxes in a graphic organizer. That way if you need to move the box, the line comes along with it.
  3. You can customize the size of the canvas to fit the project you need. Go to File–Page setup. For instance, if the limit of the header size is 800 x 200 pixels, you make your canvas that size and create it just the right size. No need to crop or fit in later when it’s uploaded.

Finally we worked on our own header for a Google Classroom, which I won’t be using for a while until our students get their own GAFE email addresses assigned. Next on my wish list.

The session I looked most forward to was using My Maps. I love maps and, I really wanted to see how Ben so cleverly compared the true size of Greenland (2.17 sq km) with Saudi Arabia (2.15 sq km) in the Demo Slam on Friday. You would never know these two countries were so similar in size if you use the all too-popular Mercator projection.

I majored in geography in college, largely because of my love for maps. In this session, it was exciting to see the great transformation over the past few years in what Google has done with their map programs. I hadn’t been paying attention!

I used to make maps showing where the participants were from in the Global Read Aloud and other experiences. I still used Maps and Forms, but it was more difficult importing my data with third party applications that most of the time I didn’t understand. Nowadays, My Maps skips the middleman! Excellent. We each easily used the same data to work on our map of places we wanted to take a virtual field trip, manipulating the data during this session. In my map you can see different colors for all the teachers who shared their Twitter handle. Ben’s was a far better and more productive  presentation than one I made several years ago when mapping our connections. (If you visit that link, I’m sorry to say you’ll find that some of the links to my maps have been lost into some unknown digital graveyard.) Ben also shared two warm-up mapping games for kids and adults–GeoGuessr and Smarty Pins. Very fun!

During the last session, I had fun using the virtual reality glasses and apps with Shina in the Google Cardboard session. Amazing! Shina is a geeky technology coach in Saudi Arabia. (And my new friend. She is the first person I met Friday morning at breakfast.) She is also the journalism teacher for her district. Her students make the yearbook for the school, and she helps them use new technologies to make a physical book more interactive. Last year’s book had tons of examples of augmented and virtual reality for readers to access in order to enhance the book. One example was a 360-degree photo sphere of the old campus they vacated last year, so it will always be available as a memory to students.

Speaking of photo spheres (Not that photosphere, Astronomers!), I took my first 360 degree photo in our meeting room at St. Christopher’s School while we waited for the last keynote to start. (Again, I was reminded of all the wide world of learning, creating, and producing we can do with just an Android device! So many things we don’t even know about, YET.) I’ll be ordering some Google Cardboard glasses ASAP!

Finally, Chrystal Hoe did a nice job wrapping up with the session with another keynote address. I loved the video she showed about Erno Rubrik about the importance of asking questions to make amazing things happen!

Check out the schedule to see what other sessions there were.

I’d like to make a challenge to my new friend, Asma, who I enjoyed tweeting with and meeting at the Google Summit. I hope to read on your new blog what you learned last weekend!

Google Apps for Education Summit, Bahrain, Day 1

I had so much fun at the GAFE Summit today! I love learning new things, and there was much to learn. It had been a long time since I was at a tech conference, and my first ever Google Summit. This one is meeting at St. Christopher’s School in Saar, Bahrain. There are people from at least a dozen countries around the region and beyond.

Mark Garrison, Ben Friesen, Chrystal Hoe, Mark Hammons, Jeff Layman, and Lissa Layman are the team leaders for this weekend. They are all very knowledgeable, approachable, and they love to learn and share.

Here are just a few brief takeaways from my first day.

Mark Garrison had a great keynote address. I was inspired to be better, to give up some of the things in my practice that aren’t working. I will START some new things, STOP some old things, and continue to SHARE my learning. It is in making my learning visible that I learn the most. I truly am the chief among learners, and I delight in it. You can share what you are learning these days at the Start, Stop and Share Challenge that Mark shared with us. I will do that after the Summit is finished.

I also went to two other sessions with Mark. One on the 4C’s – communication, collaboration, creativity and critical thinking. These 4C’s are in the tagline on this blog and on my classroom blog (actually 5 C’s on my class blog). I aspire to teach these always, and I loved Mark’s challenge to make these part of our lesson plans. Plan how and when we will let students practice each skill! The second session was a round table discussion about Start, Stop and Share. I heard from passionate educators from all over the region. They are here to make the world a better place, starting at their schools.

Lissa Layman had a great session, which was an overview of Google Sites, Documents, Slides, Forms, Calendar, and more. I immediately thought of something I will STOP, and that is sending home a paper form gathering email addresses and other beginning of the year information. I will have them complete a Google form so the info can come in digitally with much fewer errors than the paper versions produce. (Why didn’t I think of this before? I use Google forms!)

I got to experience BreakoutEDU! Such fun! We solved the game and “broke out.” I had heard of it before, but it didn’t make sense until I experienced it. (So true of so much of life, right?) I am looking forward to bringing a box back from the US this summer and participating with my Imagination Chapter.

I could go on and on about all of the Demo Slam segments. Three minutes each, showing a sweet app or hack or some digital nicety that makes the crowd go, WOW! Some of my favorites were My Map. (More on that later, as I tried it and failed miserably.) Another favorite was that Keep converts image text to editable text! What? I never knew. I came home and showed my husband, and he loved it so. It was an early birthday present for him!

The hour is late, and I’ll be up again to do another day tomorrow, so more tomorrow. In the meantime, there are more photos here, and my notes from today are here.

Easy Gathering of Student Blog Posts

Blog posts are an important way for students to share a response to what they are learning. When I taught junior high, we wrote many blog posts:

For a year or so, I read students’ blog posts through an RSS reader. I liked that because I could easily tell when someone wrote a random blog post.

However, there were times when a blog post was an assignment, and I wanted to make sure every student turned it in by a certain time. The RSS reader was not as helpful in that situation. When I had given an assignment, my reader feed was always full, and it wasn’t easy to see which posts were from the assignment at hand.

It was then that I discovered I could use a Google Form to collect URLs from their assignment. I would tweet out the link to the form using our class Twitter account, which they would find by going to our @KrebsClass Twitter page–they didn’t need their own account. Students could easily find the tweet on the Twitter page, click on the link to open the Google form, and fill it out simply by writing their name and adding their link to the current blog post assignment. A new form was made for each assignment. (Here’s good help, if you don’t yet know how to get started with Google Forms.)

Here’s an example of one of the forms we used:

My Genius Hour Blog Post

It’s fun to edit the response students will see after they submit:

Blog Post Response

After they all filled out the form, I had the URLs all in one place. It was very helpful to have a clickable list of responses on a spreadsheet. I could read through the assignments so much easier this way!

Please leave a comment and share other ways you use to organize your blog post assignments!

BONUS POST: Read on if you need a little help formatting the spreadsheet from the Google Form.

The default location for the students’ responses in a Google Form is a Google Spreadsheet with the name of your form followed by:  (Responses). When you first see the “Responses” spreadsheet, the columns are all the same size and ordered according to the time stamp. This is fine for seeing what time students turned in their blog post, but I preferred it in alphabetical order to simplify record keeping for me.

So, to format it, highlight all the information in all three columns:

GH Blog Post highlighted

 Next, click on Data and Sort Range.

GH Blog Post Sort Range

 

Then click on sort by: Column B (or whatever column you wish to sort):

GH Blog Post sort by Column B

GH Blog Post Column B choice

Now the links are in alphabetical order by student name.

Finally, if you prefer this view, you can stretch out the columns so everything fits nicely.

And voilà, you can easily enjoy your students’ blog posts!

GH Blog Post final

Thanks for reading! I hope something was helpful. As I said above, please leave a comment if you have other ideas for organizing and keeping track of your students’ blog posts.