Educational use of Google's apps - Part 1 - GMail

It's all well and good to tell people about technology-based solutions that are available for use in the classroom, but it's also important to report out on our experiences using the tools, too. I've made a big push recently to use Google's office apps in my 10th grade Biology class and in my 9th grade Integrated Science class. Given that Gmail accounts can act as a common sign-in for all Google services, and that signing up for a Gmail account in class provides an opportunity for students to get themselves an e-mail address they can feel good about putting on a college application, I started off by having all students sign up for Gmail.

At the beginning of this school year, Gmail was still an invite- or cell phone-only service, but recently they opened up the service so that you can sign up even if you don't have another e-mail account. I survey my students at the beginning of each course, and most (sometimes all) have an e-mail address, but the accounts aren't always accessible by the web and the names are not always the most ... academic. Having the students sign up for Gmail opened up a conversation about the differences between personal and professional internet use, and students seemed surprised to learn that things like e-mail addresses and social networking pages can affect the way a college might perceive them in the admissions process. Only one or two students ignored my advice to keep their account name purely academic / professional, but even these resistant students didn't choose accounts that were inappropriate, and they did have some aspect of their name involved. I guess you can't win 'em all...but overall, the experience was pretty easy, and I'm hopeful that they'll continue to use the account for their college applications.

The actual process of signing up is relatively straight-forward, but I did encounter a bit of a difficulty - when my students from my second biology section attempted to sign up, they got errors saying that a new account had already been set up and directing them to sign in. On the day that I brought my Integrated Science students in, about 20 were able to sign up before others received the "already signed up" error. I collaborated with our technology coordinator and even after clearing the caches and cookies on the school's internet server, we still couldn't find a work-around. Perhaps there's an issue on Google's end with regard to a limit on new accounts within a short period of time from a small number of closely-related IP addresses? In any case, sign up went fine the next day.

Once the students were signed in I had them send me an e-mail so that I could add them to my Contacts and start a Group for each class. I also had them send e-mails to each other to get familiar with the interface, and they quickly discovered the chat feature which I think has a lot of potential good use (I especially like how chats are automatically threaded into related e-mail conversations) but of course, a lot of potential for distraction. I used their exploration as a good time to talk about learning to be able to use chatting for academic purposes and not getting distracted from educational goals by social opportunities. As we continued through our work (which I'll describe in more detail in Parts 2 and 3), I didn't notice too much distraction - I generally found that the students seemed to enjoy the inclusion of technology enough to stay on-task (and combined that with good monitoring by walking around the room and making it a point to acknowledge that I'd be looking at everyone's screen as I did so).

Once in Gmail, I also had the students use the navigation links at the top left corner to explore Calendar and Documents. I didn't give them any specific tasks other than to "poke around a bit to check things out". Some found the Calendar app interesting (generally they were the ones who seem to be ahead of their peers with regard to time management skills), others didn't care too much about it. All of the students were intrigued when I mentioned the collaboration features on Documents - they played around a little, ran into some bumps, but I knew the exploration would make using Documents easier as it became a formal part of our work.

As a side, but important, note - our school's Technology Committee is currently discussing how we can adapt our policies (while complying with laws like the Children's Internet Protection Act - see the ALA's page on CIPA for great information) to make the best and safest use of these tools with our students. It appears that the situation is favorable to revise our school's policy against students using e-mail at school, but we also need to touch base with other parts of our community, particularly the parents.

In Part 2 of this series I'll talk in some detail about how I used Spreadsheets with Charts with my 9th grade Integrated Science students. In Part 3 of this series I'll describe how I used Documents and Blogger with my 10th grade Biology students. Stay tuned!

P.S. Check out this article for more cool ideas on how to integrate technology in the classroom.

Other online "office" apps

Some competitors to Google Apps, MS Office, Open Office, et al:

Desktoptwo: Not just "office apps" in a browser window, this brings the "whole desktop" to the browser. Essentially seems like the early stages of a WebOS environment, no screen shots available for the office functionality, but other options (MP3 player, RSS Reader, E-mail, etc) look pretty usable. Seems worth checking out, but might involve subscription fees for storage beyond 1 GB.

Ajax13: Includes ajaxWrite, ajaxSketch, ajaxXLS, ajaxPresents, and ajaxTunes. The "look and feel" is very similar to desktop apps, design seems intuitive and appealing to the eye, and most important, the tools are free. The XLS spreadsheet program was not accessible at the time of this writing, but the "learn more" page for it did mention that the primary tool was a spreadsheet *viewer*, while their *editing* application is still in development. The Presents tool seems nice, though it runs a bit slow on this G3 iBook. Ajax13 is also in the process of developing AjaxO.S., which would appear to compete directly with the above-mentioned Desktoptwo.

21st Century Teaching and Alternative Certification

The NSTA recently published a book on modern science education, and they've been taking bits and pieces of the book and putting them on their site as "WebNews Digests". The most recent Digest relates issues of modern practice with certification programs (both traditional and alternative), pointing out that there are difficulties with both routes to certification, but that educators with alternative certifications tend to leave the profession earlier and more frequently because the experience was not aligned with their expectations. Although the article is focused on science education, I think the core ideas in the article are applicable to all educators, and as such, I think this counts as a 'widget'. The underlying ideas in the article are a mental model for what it means to develop as a modern educator, and they are a powerful organizing tool for guiding our own development and the development of current and future education professionals.

The ideas, and therefore the mental model, are pretty straight-forward. First, teachers need pedagogical content knowledge that is specialized to their subject area(s). It is important here to distinguish between subject knowledge and pedagogical knowledge; they are both important, but pedagogical content knowledge tends to be less emphasized in teacher preparation than subject content knowledge. This is important because we need to develop specialized skills to be able to facilitate subject content knowledge development in our students. Second, teachers need guided field experience in order to actually develop these specialized pedagogical skills. Too often the guidance is provided infrequently, if at all, and is not collaborative between the K-12 and University teachers who are supposed to be guiding the developing teacher. Also mentioned in the article is that early teacher field experience is too often focused on specific outcomes (both for the developing teacher and the K-12 students), and not on the processes of developing better skills for better student learning. Finally, developing teachers will tend to teach as they have been taught - after all, we humans are great apes, and tend to mimic the experiences we've had in the past. Development programs for teachers need to take on the "do as I do" approach, as opposed to the more traditional "do as I say". Further complexity is added by the time that it takes to accomplish all of these changes, but awareness of the importance of these issues for teachers of all subjects and at all levels is the first step in the process of ensuring great teachers for 21st century students.

Here now: Charts and Graphs in Google Spreadsheets

Google has (finally!) added charts and graphs to it's Spreadsheet application. I've been waiting for charts functionality before really "digging in" to the usability of the application, since building charts is such an important follow-through to most of the data collection and analysis I'd be interested in. Today I'll begin to test things out by having my 9th grade Integrated Science students make stacked bar graphs (or other formats, if they make sense) showing the relative proportion of nutrients in some foods that they eat. I've decided that I want to test both the charts and the collaborative functions at the same time, so I'm going to have my students work in groups of four, and each group will be responsible for building a chart representing the data. Rather than sharing six separate files, though, I'm going to use separate sheets for each group, so I can just share the one document with all 24 students. One sheet will provide an example set of data with an example chart (shown), another sheet will hold the class data, and six sheets will be actively used by the groups. Along the way I hope to make sure the students know how to copy & paste data between sheets in a spreadsheet, and that they get some basic instruction and practice on putting formulas into cells.