Google Mobile Bootcamp Sweden - Stockholm (part II)

Today was a very good day at the Google Mobile Bootcamp at Bromma Folkhögskola near Stockholm. I was very pleased with my sessions about Google Classroom and could tell that the attendees were happy with me sharing workarounds in Google Classroom. And due to the fact that I did this session twice today helpt me to understand and work even better with this application. Some new things and creative ideas came along, whilst sharing and discussing Google Classroom with the Swedish teachers. Can’t wait to start with this in the new period with my classes and share new ideas with the teachers in my school.

My last session was level two Certfied Educator about Blogger, Calendar (and the sharing settings) Forms and My Maps. With the help of the attendants I was able to show them how to create a form real quickly and have the content imported as a layer in My Maps, which showed the places where the teachers lived. Amazing tool. And we discussed about other pedagical values of the Google Forms and My Maps applicactions within the Google Apps for Education domain.

At the end of the day I shared the awesome workaround of the in only in gafe running collaborative tool SMARTamp, by showing the teachers workspaces that my students did create earlier this year.

Now I need to start processing on doing Google Bootcamps with EdTechTeam in the Netherlands.

Bootcamp Google Apps for Education - Gothenburg (part I)

Traveled to Gothenburg, Sweden to show and share my experiences with Google Apps for Education; in particular the focus on Level 2 of the certification program. Which contains applications like blogger, Google sites, adding annotations to a YouTube video, my maps, creating forms, sharing options of Google Calendar, sharing files and documents. All in favor to work smart and focus on the three C’s: collaboration, communication and creation.

Bit too technical if you ask me, but a good way to prepare for the final exams to become a certified Google Educator Level 1 and/or two. From my opinion teachers shouldn’t worry or bother about the technical background of certain applications. Google Classroom does a real good job by being a portal for all those background technical stuff and makes it easy for students to gain access to certain folders and files and a platform is created where students can collaborate together on different tasks and assessments.

So I’ve shared a lot of stuff about Google Classroom: adding students, students’ rights, Classroom stream, reposting assignments, collaboration, adding teachers and the more pedagogical value of the use of Google Classroom. I do hope that the attendants did learn something from my sessions today and I wish them all the luck acing those Google Educator Exams.

At the Demo-Slam I shared the SMARTamp application: cloud based collaborative software, which only runs on a Google Apps for Education domain and can even be shared cross domain. I shared two workspaces created by my students and one created by my and Danesa Jepson (#smartee from CA) her students as a collaborative project.

Me and my colleague that I brought with me were very fond of this bootcamp idea and thought of the idea to organize such a thing for the students in our school. We will try to do that in our school. Will keep you updated.

GAFE Summit

Last year in London, UK I met Ken Shelton from the EdTechTeam and since that time we haven't stopped talking about joining forces and collaborating. Recently I was asked if I would like to join the European EdTechTeam in order to present at Google Apps for Education Summits (gafe), iOS Summits and Future Ready School Summits. I am more than happy to share my experience and work with teachers at occasions such as these and love to join this team. My first official appearance will be in Saudi Arabia at the Saudi Arabia Summit at the international school in Dhahran. This two-day high-intensity event focuses on deploying, integrating, and using Google Apps for Education (and other Google tools) to promote student learning in K-12 and higher education. I will be presenting about SMART amp and Google Classroom. 

Now to arrange visa, flight tickets etc. and I want to prepare myself for this trip as I have never visited the Middle East before and want to learn more about the the dress code etc. in order to do this as smoothly as possible. 

And thanks to my school that allows me to do such things besides teaching ...

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UPDATE (29th October 2015)

I returned this Tuesday from the embassy and it turned out that the paperwork - the invitation - was not right. At first the place of application stated on the invitation is Washington and should be The Hague. And second I needed a letter from a Dutch(!) company that has an account number in the Chamber of Commerce in the Netherlands. Which EdTech hasn’t.
Travista is to blame because the send me the wrong document two weeks ago (little did I know) instead of sending me the invitation document from Saudi Arabia. So I won’t be able to travel to Saudi Arabia to join in on the team and help out at the gafe summit. But there will be more EdTech Summits that I will be presenting in the near future!

Netherlands Google Apps for Education Summit

One of the cool things is to present at education summits in order to share best practices and share ideas with others attending the summit. As you could've read in another blog post I applied to do a session about SMART amp at the Netherlands Google Apps for Education Summit this weekend and that went very well. I did prepare my presentation in English, but due to the fact that only Dutch people attended I did it in Dutch anyway. I handed out some leaflets with more information and every attendant received a SMART Board pointer. The attendants needed to log in to SMART amp with pre-created accounts by me and needed to work together in a workspace where I published a assessment as well. The teacher that gained the least score for the assessment received a SMART amp t-shirt, due to the fact that all the other teachers scored 100% on the assessment.

On Sunday we we started with a real good Keynote by Dan Leighton (Director of Technology, Grammar School of Leeds) about effective strategies in the classroom to gain more engaged students and higher grades. Top two things concerning was he impact of good feedback (formative evaluation) to students and and meta-cognition (self reported grades). I need to process on this ...

The first session was getting more out of the admin console with Google Admin within your domain. I've learned a lot of things and Sarah Woods really took my understanding of working within the admin console to the next level. I'm very happy that I learned a lot today already. Next was the session of Warren Apel with easy to use tips and tricks on how to create engaging activities with Google Maps in your classroom. This was really mind bowing and I've shared a few interesting links in this blog and will create a new one about the cool things you can do with My Maps in Google Maps.

This Google Apps for Education Summit was awesome and I do have a lot to take with me and need to process on!!!

Cool tips and tricks:

Realtime Board: online whiteboard in your browser.
Thematic Mapping: create kml-files for Google Earth.
Open Signal: compare phone signal coverage in the entire world!
GeoGuessr: Explore the world in a real fun and challenging way.
Time Machine with Google Street View.
Google Treks: help out Google Street View in places where cars can't get to.

Cool fun fact that I learned: did you know that when you need to type something unreadable when signing in somewhere, the so called captcha thing, is actually really cool and whenever you use it you' helping out humanity by helping to save our own ancient cultures? These hardly readable things we need to re-type are actually pieces of text from ancient written text and we ar actually helping out to translate them. And the blurry pictures of street numbers we need to re-write are actually from pictures Google Street View took and we help out by mapping the world better. Ain't that just awesome?