I returned last night after spending the weekend in Canberra, attending the Ed Tech teams GAFE (Google Apps for Education) Summit at Gungahlin College. It was a wonderful weekend. The people who present are knowledgeable and so keen to share what they know, freely making their resources available and allowing teachers new to Google Apps to encounter the sharing nature of the community that surrounds GAFE.
The truly interesting part of this weekend was discovering that the ACT Government Education and Training Directorate (the body who runs public education) have provided all public schools with access to Google Apps for Education. In fact, they have provided what they are calling a ‘Digital Backpack’ for schools that includes access to Office 365 as well as other browser based digital offerings. It’s a very progressive move – I was very impressed with the thinking that has gone into this and the opportunities it is presenting to children in the ACT Government system of Education.
I tweet a lot at conferences like this – it’s my form of notetaking, with the benefit that I’m sharing these notes with the people following me on Twitter. I’ve collated them into a Storify – click this link if you’d like to see inside my head over the last two days!
I presented about deploying Google Apps in your school. Toorak College has been a Google Apps school for over a year now and the experience has been transformative for many of us. Slides are below if you want to take a look.
Thanks to everyone who worked hard to make the weekend work – it was well worth the trip!
Lucacept - intercepting the Web 
Thanks for the Slideshow – it’s really helpful. We are looking at “Going Google” but also need to consider a LMS – our current one has no longevity. I see your name on a Schoolbox testimonial site and here you mention Hapara. Do you have any pros/cons you have time to share?
Probably best answered by looking at my recent post https://jennyluca.com/2015/03/08/why-im-not-suffering-from-technostress/ Schoolbox serves the purpose of being the space where we can frontload content and have spaces where we can communicate with our students – social stream allows them to become part of the communication process too. Hapara Teacher Dashboard provides the management layer of Google Apps for Education. Teachers can easily view what is in student folders in Drive, allowing them to give point of need feedback and to add docs/sheets/slides to their folders so that collaborative work pieces are in their folders prior to class. The three systems each provide a piece that makes for easy teacher workflow.
That sounds like it would have been an absolutely fascinating conference to be at actually. It’s the first time I’ve heard of schools offering Office365 to students but it is something Uni’s seem to do (Deakin & Charles Sturt offer it though RMIT offered the Professional package for $100 which is a lot cheaper) so perhaps it’s not too surprising that they are going down that path too? I mean it’s the only reason I have office myself! Still, I am glad that this sort of thing is becoming more and more common.
Ms. Jenny Luca
Hello my name is Shelby Jemison and I am a student in the elementary education program at the University of South Alabama. I am currently taking a class called EDM 310. This course is to teach us as future educators how to incorporate technology in the classroom. Your blog is filled with wonderful resources for exactly that. I loved reading about your recent conference. The fact that it was an entire conference based on Google for the classroom sounds so amazing. I would love to one day get the opportunity to go to a conference like that. Another thing I loved was the fact that you tweet throughout the entire weekend and use the tweets as your notes. That is such a wonderful idea because not only are you taking notes to remember and document things you are learning but you are sharing it with the world (especially other teachers) That is fabulous and I definitely plan on following you on twitter!
Thank You
Shelby Jemison
Thanks for the kind words Shelby. Best of luck with the course. Teaching is a wonderful career to pursue. I wish you well.