#rewind2014

This past year was a very good year for me from a professional point of view. In January I spend a whole week presenting in the SMART Collaborative Classroom at BETT, London-UK, the largest education and technology trade show in Europe. In July I attended and presented at the Global SMART Exemplary Educators Summit in Calgary, Canada. And this was most amazing and met a lot of new friends and partners to work with. In October I was present at a Google Apps for Education Summit (#gafesummit) in London, UK and I was selected to attend the Google Teacher Academy in Amsterdam, Netherlands in November. A few new certificates and rewards were added to my professional development roadmap ... Let's continue to do so in 2015!

Google Teacher Academy

As you could've read on this blog in an earlier post (July '14) about my roadmap of professional development that I would apply to the Google Teachers Academy to become a Google Certified Teacher and while doing that I wanted to do some online Google courses to become a Google Educator. In order to become a Google Educator I need to pass a total of five exams, of which four are required: Google Docs & Drive, Gmail, Google Sites and Google Calendar and one elective course and I've picked Google Chrome (the browser). Well, I've done all the things concerning Google that I wanted to do.
The courses took me quite long to take, especially when a fulltime job as mentor and teacher in secondary education is due too. And I didn't expect it to be that difficult and more imported inspiring and worth for. The first exam I took was Gmail and I failed. It got only 75% and needed at least 80%. This was the one that made me nervous for all the other exams and made me prepare the next ones way better and according to some reviews of others the Gmail exam was the hardest one. Anyway, I passed all the required courses and stil need to make time for the final elective one in order to become a Google Educator.

I've also signed up for a Google Apps For Education summit in London. This summit will be held at an international school in downtown London, UK and I really do hope to gain a lot. I'm quite new to this Google Education thing and really want to keep up. Especially in order to maintain as iCoach or instructional technology specialist in my own school and therefore I cannot only rely on Apple hard- and software. Google is around all of us and particularly the students and I want and need to keep up and add the useful education tools from Google to my lessons and the way I teach and the way students could learn.

And at last but not least I applied for the Google Teachers Academy and was notified this week that my application was approved and I am going to the Google Teachers Academy in Amsterdam on the 4th and 5th of November. This was great news for me this week and I do hope that at the end of november I'm so comfortable with Google Apps for Education that I can and will use this and SMARTamp (which is linked to Google Apps) in my classroom.

GTA Application video (in Dutch language)

Thanks to all the North American SMART Exemplary Educators, that I met at the Global SEE Summit in Calgary this summer for the inspiration and especially Lise Galuga. Now on to the last online Google course! #Chrome