Google Sites – Enabling students to aspire to a higher quality of research and presentation work

Published on 10 May, 2012 in blended learning, Cloud Computing, ePortfolios, Google Apps, Google Sites, History, Students and Web Design. 1 Comment

Last year my Year 9 History class was about to embark on their task of researching Old Boys from their school who fought in the First World War. The dual purpose of the topic was for these new entrants to learn about the history of their school, their country at the time and the battle fields of the War.

Having successfully challenged the class to use Google Docs to research and present the Ancient Rome topic, I decided to take it one step further and ask them if they would like to build a class website. This was a risky undertaking as it would require an already high level and difficult individual research task to be presented in a shared and co-ordinated approach. With some Web Design (Digital Technologies) teaching background I had confidence that I could assist a small team of enthusiastic students from within the class to help prepare and manage the technical aspects of the project.

The topic background was introduced over the last two weeks of Term Two with the full research and presentation project introduced and completed during Term Three of 2011. Here is the completed class website with each student completing and signing off at the bottom of their respective page. Their research was completed on a separate Google document template. On the website I have written here fully about how the research project was implemented along with some reflections. I also presented on it in a workshop at the U-learn teachers conference in October 2011.

Google Sites in Education are being increasingly used for School Extra-Curricular Sports and Arts – Club, Team and Group websites. I have even seen Sites being implemented this year in interesting ways for student centred houses at Nayland College (Nelson). And of course many teachers and students have Google Sites for classes or student portfolios.

The way that I have utilised Google Sites here is to get students to take their research work to another level. To set their expectations higher and to teach them about:

  • Research Quality and Standards
  • Writing Content for the Web
  • Web Presentation – Navigation and Consistency
  • Teamwork – Collaboration and Communication

What I have come to appreciate is that the higher the level of expectation that I set for my students then the more they aspired to meet it. For example, the more prepared, well designed and professional the student web development team made the website template look when presented to the rest of the class, then the more the sense of expectation of a higher quality of work that the class aspired to.

Of course this was my first attempt and there are things that I would certainly do differently given another opportunity at this sort of task, but I definite enjoyed teaching in this student centred, inquiry focused and collaborative style and I know that my students enjoyed it and undoubtedly gained from the experience.

Moodle and Google Apps after 9 Months – Our Students Respond

Published on 28 December, 2010 in Google Apps, Google Docs, Moodle and Students. 0 Comments Tags: , , , , , .

Well its been a long year and a good 8 months since my last post. I sound a bit like a lapsed Catholic in a confession with the irregularity of my posts – but its been such a busy year and I now have a bit of energy and something to say about how things have been going. My last post was about how we had implemented our new Moodle site, which some of our students had requested be named MyColl, and the successes that we had experienced. The site has gone from strength to strength and feedback from a number of reputable sources show that MyColl has been one of busiest school Moodle sites in the country.

We completed an online survey in November, 9 months after we had introduced the integrated Moodle & Google Apps site to the school, which ran for about 10 days to gauge our student feedback. It ran for the period just as our senior students were preparing to and left for exams. The response rate was over 20% of the student body. The survey was anonymous though students were required to sign in via their school Google Accounts – here is a link to a parallel survey.

One of the responses from the survey was that a good proportion of our students were accessing resources from home. Our school is a regular Day School with no boarders and is only just starting on a path of teachers putting work online. To have so many students accessing the Learning Management System from home in its first year is very encouraging.

The uptake of Google Docs across the College by students in just 9 months is both surprising and also hugely encouraging. Although 25% of the students have never used Docs, 75% have had some exposure with 34% being regular users (either “Often” or “All the time”). It is anticipated that usage of Google Docs will grow more sharply in 2011 with Google’s huge on-going investment to improve the product and more staff planning to use the tool within their teaching programmes.

What feature(s) do you MOST LIKE about MyColl?

About half the students who completed the survey took the opportunity to write comments on features which they liked about the site. Here is a wordcloud that gives a visual impression of what they liked the most.

Finally, the students were asked if they would like a student area to discuss, debate, vote and engage one another on school based issues. With the advent of social forums such as facebook (currently blocked within school due to its highly distractive nature) I expected that students would rather stay away from a school based social network. However, I was pleasantly surprised at the response as you can see below. We will be launching “Student Voice” for students in early 2011.

Well those are a few of the responses from our students. As you can see another busy year ahead with a few more projects to get under way. I intend to get a post out once per month this coming year, but don’t hold me to it.

Happy New Year to all.

MyColl (Our New Moodle Site) – 2 months in

Published on 12 April, 2010 in Cloud Computing, Google Apps, Google Docs and Moodle. 3 Comments Tags: , , , , , , .

Well our new Moodle Site (MyColl) has now been going just over 2 months. The idea to replace our school Microsoft File Sharepoint(less) site with Moodle grew last year as some staff started using a “Rebel” Moodle site that I provisioned. By early October I also had a handful of students requesting that we replace it. Two of the students helped me develop a site plan and they came up with the idea of naming it “MyColl” (as Wellington College students often refer to themselves as Coll Boys). I whipped up a Photoshop mock-up of what the site would look like. I was careful to include the integration of Google Apps Education Edition as an essential element. I presented the idea to the school’s Senior Management team Mid October. The idea was that the site would be the “hub” of online activity for the school on top of being a teaching & learning site.

By the end of October the site was hosted and themed for us by Totali. They also provided a tool called TSync which syncs password changes on the school’s Active Directory through to online services. We also made MyColl the browser home page on all computers, plus we enabled SSO (single-sign-on) so that students and staff were automatically signed into Google Apps when signed into Moodle.

Key Features of MyColl

  1. Students Input and Ownership – they named it and also designed the logo (over 1/3 of the school voted online for the student finalists who submitted their Logo design online)
  2. The MyTools dropdown provides access to all student Google Apps
  3. We do not allow students to change photos (their school ID is uploaded for them), First or Last Name, and Email Addresses – this forces them to access school Gmail accounts. If they want to fool around then they use FaceBook.
  4. A Gmail Block appears (once logged in) on the front page with unread mail headings displayed
  5. We turned off Moodle Calendar completely – opting instead for the more generic Google Calendar (all departments are required to place assessment dates on the school assessment calendar embedded in the site. We also have our standard Public Calendar embedded and a Sports Calendar was also added.
  6. School Events and information are updated regularly on the home page (though we are currently in the April School Holidays)
  7. There are a range of public pages for parental and public access and information. A number of pages and most courses require logins.

The site is deemed to be “under construction” as a number of pages are still to be added over the next few months (we are aiming for one new page/course  every week or two).

How successful has it been?

I am presenting the site to the New Zealand Moodle Moot (Conference) this week. My presentation is on the integration of Moodle and Google Apps with a discussion around Google Docs as a teaching & learning tool. As I was putting together the presentation I gathered some statistics on our MyColl site.

Key Statistics Are:

  • We are averaging 1200 “Unique” logins per week (out of a school of 1530 students and 120 staff) – From Moodle Stats
  • We are averaging about 1500 “Absolute Unique Visitors” Daily – Google Analytics (interpreted this means from a different browser/computer)
  • Interesting is that although there is a drop-off of “Absolute Unique Visitors” on Friday and Saturday, Sunday when school is closed sees us maintain the 1500 visitors.
  • In the last 15 DAYs of school (since we enabled Google Analytics) we have had 28,400 Visits, 8700 Absolute Unique Visitors with 116,840 Pageviews.

Considering we have been effectively going for only 9 school weeks this is very encouraging. Only about 25-30% of teachers are using it regularly with their students. As training is provided and courses are developed over coming months, we should see the usage really take off!

Why has it been successful?

I believe that the integration of Google Apps with the Moodle Site has been one of the keys. The site is steadily growing to become the communication hub of the school as well as an effective growing eLearning site.

Feel free to explore the site at http://mycoll.school.nz and ask any questions here.

Fast Changing Web Trends – Student Snapshots

Published on 20 February, 2010 in Cool Tools, Google Apps, Google Docs, Students and Web Design. 5 Comments Tags: , , , , , .

Besides being a teacher of High School Mathematics and History (I only know of one other teacher in the country who also has this combination) I have also just started my second year of teaching Web Design & Development to Year 12 (16-17 year olds), a course that I developed last year.

On the first day of the course the students are asked to complete an online survey – a Google Form of course. The final question in the survey asks the students to “List 10 words which come to mind when the word Internet is mentioned”. This is an individual task where students cannot consult other students. I then display their results by copying/pasting their answers to Wordle to form a Word Cloud, in which the words that are entered multiple times display larger than others.

This exercise in itself creates good discussion among students, however this is the first year that I have been able to compare the results to the previous year. The results (below) created great discussion and highlighted to students how quickly new tools are adopted and sometimes at the expense of others.

Snapshot taken beginning February 2009 (26 students):

[click on image to enlarge]

Snapshot taken beginning February 2010 (54 students – 2 classes):

[click on image to enlarge]

Most telling Trends (for teenagers)

  1. Facebook was a small player a year ago (smaller than bebo) but now is the most dominant (with bebo dropping)
  2. Using the web to access Information is not as strong
  3. YouTube whose 5th birthday is this week has grown further
  4. Email has emerged more strongly – possibly because of the trend towards webmail and away from PC based software such as Outlook
  5. Music has dropped significantly – can anyone suggest why this might be??
  6. Porn (top right in 2009) fails to get a mention in 2010 – I don’t know what to make of that
  7. Explorer (Internet Explorer) doesn’t rate a mention this year – probably because we rolled out Firefox 3 days earlier
  8. Google is still the dominant player for internet searching, well at least in New Zealand anyway

I know that this was hardly a scientific survey, but it did stimulate some interesting discussion.

Google Forms (survey tool in Google Docs) and Wordle (word clouds) are a powerful combination of tools that could be used effectively across a range of subjects in a variety of ways. If anyone would like to contribute their experiences or ideas then do feel free to reply to this post.

Implementing Google Apps Education Edition – the experience so far

Published on 17 January, 2010 in Cloud Computing, Cool Tools, Google Apps and Google Docs. 7 Comments Tags: , , .

Well I am in the middle of my busiest time as a teacher and eLearning Director – believe it or not but I am supposed to be in the middle of the summer holidays. I haven’t posted since September last year with good reason. In Mid October 2009 our school made the decision to go ahead with my recommendation for a Google Apps Education Edition deployment. As you can see from previous posts a small number of staff used Google Docs effectively and were able to share those benefits with key decision-makers.

Preparations

With staff off on the 7 week summer holiday break around mid-December I felt the need to do the changeover before then so that they receive some training and use the Apps over the holidays.  I set a target date of Monday 30th November with the migration of old email from Microsoft Exchange on the preceding weekend. Our IT Department did the initial set-up but we decided to contact a Google representative in New Zealand, Jan Zawadski of Cloudbreak, to assist with the migration to ensure its success. Although this was at a cost it was well worthwhile as we could use his experience from assisting business adoption of Enterprise Apps. It was also important that the change-over be relatively smooth for the 140 staff involved otherwise we could lose their goodwill.

Roll-out to Staff

First off an email was sent to staff 3 weeks ahead (9th November) informing them of the upcoming change and what it would mean. As you can see from the information sheet (Wellington College Gmail change) we introduced it as an EMAIL change as this is where staff would feel the most impact. Also, all teaching staff were told that they would be given the option of having Gmail running through Microsoft Outlook but not until mid February 2010 – it was important for them to try the Gmail interface fully before they opted back to what they were familiar with.

One of the recommendations from the our Google Rep was to set up a Google Help Site and to modify one of the templates available. As I had already used a Google Site with my rugby team I found this to be a relatively simple exercise - Wellington College Google Apps Support.

Gmail Training

With a successful migration over the weekend, I then ran several 45 minute Gmail training sessions throughout Monday 30th November and Tuesday 1st December for the staff. Here is what was covered [There is a Word Doc copy at bottom of page - feel free to download and modify the training session for yourself].

Feedback from the sessions was very positive with staff pleased with the extra functionality of Gmail. Some who already had personal Gmail accounts commented that they were not aware of all of the extras that they learnt about. One of the things that I promoted heavily was the ability for users to search for old emails using the power of Google search and the advanced search features – this was definitely a winner.

We had made the decision to allow all of the support staff (approximately 30) to run Gmail through the Microsoft Outlook interface. The biggest measure of success is that within 2 weeks all but one staff member (a power user of Outlook) had opted to stay with the Gmail web interface. Outstanding! Of course I was called on to help individuals one-on-one leading into Christmas. The biggest misunderstanding by staff about Gmail that I came across was the difference between folders and labels.

Calendar Training

A week later I followed up the Gmail training with Google Calendar Training. I had already discussed with school management the idea of separate Google Calendars for the school events. The first is for staff events which remains private, however it was decided to have 2 public calendars for school events:

  • Wellington College Public – is a calendar for parents, students, staff and the wider College community events
  • Wellington College Assessments – is a calendar which Heads of Departments agreed to put all internal and external assessment information for Senior classes. This means that parents and students can track when assessments are due and departments can see when there is a heavy workload on students.

Link to Calendar Training Session

Google Calendar was the tool that originally converted me to Google Applications back in August 2008. I can already see from staff reaction that Google Calendar is going to prove to be a powerful tool in the school.

14 Days until  Student Roll-out

Well 1550 students return in 2 weeks time and will be pleasantly surprised to find that staff are confidently using Gmail and Google Calendar. They will also be given new network logins which will sync through to their new Gmail accounts. After some deliberation we decided to name student users in the format: “surname,first initial, first year,@ school domain” eg smithj07@wellington-college.school.nz – the purpose being that we can filter the students by year level or organise them by surname. One thing that we have discovered is that Google will need to improve the their Administration tools very soon to make it easier for administrators to run Apps institutions with a large number of users.

To encourage students and staff to use Google Docs I have been busy over the last few days creating a variety of useful templates. We will also be using Google Forms extensively throughout the school.

Finally, the College is launching a new Moodle Site concurrently with the Google Apps launch. I am also busy building and populating the site. This was another decision, made last October, to replace our old Microsoft SharePoint intranet (Now you can see why I haven’t posted for 4 months). The Moodle site is not ready yet but I will be writing a post about it in early February.

Well that’s all for now. I hope you get something out of this post.

Happy New Year
Mark

Fantastic Forms

Published on 15 September, 2009 in Cool Tools and Google Docs. 5 Comments Tags: , , .

I have been meaning to write this post for some time now so here it is.

At the start of this school year (February for those in the Northern Hemisphere) I started introducing Google Forms (surveys) with my own classes and also to other teachers. For those not aware, Google Forms are a function of Google Docs. They are very simple to create – simplicity of use being one of Google’s principles. Information from submitted forms feeds into a Google Spreadsheet and results can also be viewed in a nice graphical summary view.

Here is a list of some of the ways that I have used Forms with my classes and activity groups:

  • Group Preferences – My History class were placed in groups for one of the topics. They gave me confidential feedback as to who in the class they felt most comfortable working with.
  • Intro to the Course Questionnaire – used to gather student knowledge at the beginning of a course
  • Word Association tasks – used to gather a range of words students associate with a topic – This example is from my Year 9 History class for words associated with “Ancient Rome”. The words were then pasted into Wordle.net to make a word cloud.
  • End of Topic Surveys – Great for gathering information on what type of activities the students thought were the most useful or enjoyable and of course etc.
  • Gathering Contact List Details – I used this to create contact lists for parents of my care group (Form Class), for the Rugby Team that I coached and of course emailing lists for my classes
  • Online Application Forms – The Tech Crew students who I help organise applied for membership via a Google Form
  • Class Vote – My Web Design class voted anonymously for the best website produced as part of an assignment [I won't give the link to this one as my students names are listed]
  • Team Vote – My Rugby Team voted anonymously for end of season prizes for Most Valuable Player, Most Consistent Player etc. [Again my players names are listed so I won't link for privacy reasons]
  • Group Member and Topic Preferences – My Year 9 History Class informed me of who they were working with in their groups and their preferred topics for research projects.

Here are some of the ways that Forms have been used school wide:

  • Professional Development Feedback – I have run a range of Teacher Professional Development workshops on Moodle and Google Docs.
  • School Survey – Members of our school community (students, teachers, parents) were invited to complete a survey on the qualities that they thought were important in a Wellington College (our school) learner.
  • Teacher Workshop Choices – on our last Professional Development day Teachers completed an emailed form to choose between a range of workshops
  • Scholarship Practice Examination Slots – Our Deputy Principal gathered choices of slots for optional practice exams (to be held this week and next). Some of the subjects were held at the same time whereas others were the students choices when to sit. All of this information was gathered and collated from well over 100 students. The Deputy Principal said that it saved him at least 10 hours of collation and chasing up students.
  • Sports Day Entries – Our Head of Sports just today asked me to design a form for approximately 500 students to choose events to compete in along with their DOB, Age Groups etc for next February’s Sports Day
I have created Links to some of the forms above to give you an idea of how I have designed them. Please do NOT complete or any of them submit. It is worth noting that you can turn the forms on and off depending on whether you wish to accept responses or not.

Other features are:

  • A choice of themes to make the forms more visually attractive
  • The forms can be emailed as a link or added to web pages by embedding or linking
  • One great feature is that you can add additional information into new columns in the spreadsheet without affecting later entries into the form
  • All entries are time/date-stamped so that you know when the information was submitted
  • Already mentioned are the great summary tools which automatically create useful graphs for quick analysis
If you have not used Google Forms then do give them a go. They are VERY SIMPLE. Just create a Google Account if you haven’t already and start using them….You won’t look back. They have saved many hours of time for myself and a growing number of our Teaching, Administration and Management staff.

Google Docs for Collaboration (Part 4)

Published on 28 August, 2009 in Cloud Computing, Google Docs, History and Students. 0 Comments Tags: , .

Well its been 6 weeks since my last posting. I have been incredibly busy but have continued to use Google Docs for Collaborative work with my students. Here is another way that I have used Google Docs in the last few weeks.

Year 9 (13-14 Year Old) Research and Presentation – Ancient Rome

I decided recently that I have had enough of doing all of the work in preparing and teaching for me a new topic. I decided to get the students to do a 8-12 minute presentation to the class on a topic within Ancient Rome. They were to work in groups of 2 or 3 (their choice).

Choosing Groups and Topics – Google Form
First I listed a range of topics for the students to choose from or they could suggest their own. I gave them a link to a Google Form where they could put in their preferences for group members and topic preferences (3). This made it easy for me to collate & appoint topics to each. Here is a link to the Google Form the students filled out.

Planning & Research – Google (Document and Spreadsheet)
The students then worked in groups on developing Three Focus Questions for their topic. This was done in Moodle Forums to allow students to feedback to other groups. They then worked collaboratively on a Google Research Document which would become their presentation notes. I did the activity myself on the topic “Hadrian’s Wall” as I wanted to model to the students what was required. As I write some of the students have already presented while others are yet to. I used a Google Spreadsheet (collaborated to all students) to allow the students to choose time-slots for their presentations. This was another time-saver and worked really well as students raced to choose the best times.

Presentations – Google Presentation
The students, having done most of their research and planning, were now at the stage to develop their presentation slides to support their presentation notes. This of course was done in Google Presentation. Again, I modeled this for the students (link here) as I wanted them to see that the slides were visual (with no or limited writing) and used to support what was being presented (voice). This simple presentation technique is still overlooked by many presenters. Presentations with a combination of both a voice script and reading off slides have long been proven to be the least effective.

So far two groups have presented and the standard has been reasonably good and will no doubt get better as students evaluate those that went before them. I have three more in about 30 minutes time so got to go.

I hope that this use of Google Docs for Collaboration has been of some use.

Google Docs for Collaboration (Part 3)

Published on 12 July, 2009 in Google Docs and History. 2 Comments Tags: , , .

Well here we are again looking at ways that Google Docs can be used to help improve teaching and learning. My History class students recently wrote an essay in Google Docs which they shared to me as a Collaborator.

I was able to write directly into their essays with feedback (in teacher red of course). I gave them the obvious grammar and spelling corrections along with tips on how to improve their essay structure and writing. I was also able to link them to a model writing plan and essay for this particular answer. This exercise allowed for direct feedback to the students on their written work which, according to a major international study this year, is the key ingredient to effective teaching.

But the collaboration allowed for in Google Docs did not end there. Earlier in the year I had the students create a personal assessment record document from this published template. They collaborated this back to me which I keep in an assessment folder in Google Docs. The students were tasked with reading the feedback I had given them in their online essays and to summarise this in their personal assessment records. Next time they write an essay they will first read what they need to do to improve on their last effort.

Here are some examples of what the students wrote in their summary for their first essay. Students are Year 11 (age 15-16) and the essay was about the reactions to the Treaty of Versailles in the Origins of World War Two Topic:

Student 1: [Merit "B" Grade] – Good structure. Introduction is very good. Sometimes irrelevant, so need to work on cutting down information until only the key points remain. Don’t write the essay like a story, focus on the why as much as the who, what and how. The conclusion was too brief and rushed the end of the essay. It needs to sum up every aspect of the essay, rather than a general overview. The key to getting Excellence is to refine the essay.

Student 2: [Achieved "C" Grade] – Writing style is fine but need to work on content and focus on all the parties involved. I need to stick to my plan and not lose my focus on the question. I also must not give my opinion directly.

Student 3: [Achieved "C" Grade] – In my detail and content i was (waffeling) and much of my content wasnt relavant to what my essay was about. I did this quite alot in my essay and i will have to make sure i dont do it in future. I also should not have used ‘I’ and ‘me’ in my essay because it isnt about my opinion. My spelling also needs some work i shouldnt be in such a rush while writing.

How many times do we hand back marked work where students look at the grade and no further? At least the students have a permanent record of their essay, teacher feedback, a link to model essay, their own summary of where to improve and their grade.

Well, I hope this very practical use of Google Docs is of some use to you.

Terminating the Textbook

Published on 11 June, 2009 in Cloud Computing and Mobile Devices. 2 Comments Tags: , .

I read an interesting article today sourced from the Times on Line and making it to our local paper (Dominion Post, Wellington). Governor Arnie wants to “terminate” the textbook to save money for the debt-ridden Californian economy. His reason, electronic devices and online learning are replacing the textbook and will save money for schools (his State budget) in the long run. Of course Arnie is going against his best instincts here. Surely the youth of today need to build up their back muscles by carrying around heavily laden bags of textbooks?

Arnie’s message, if perhaps for purely economic reasons, is of course an acknowledgement of where things are inevitably heading. Once institutions can see that an initial investment in web based and mobile learning tools and resources will save them money in the long run, the shift will accelerate.

An afterthought from a History Teacher: Didn’t another Austrian once try to destroy books? At least this one is a lot taller and doing it for the right reasons…

Google Docs for Collaboration (Part 2)

Published on 7 June, 2009 in Cloud Computing, Cool Tools and Google Docs. 2 Comments Tags: , .

This is the second in a sequence of posts outlining ways that I have used Google Docs with my classes.

Once my Year 11 History class had become very familiar with Docs I was able to give them a group presentation task. I mentioned in my previous post that I had split them into groups of three for collaborative note-building. Well these groups were named after the New Zealand Prime Ministers after World War II (1945-85). I thought it would be a good idea that each group introduced their Prime Minister to the rest of the class as a 5 minute presentation. Of course this was to be done chronologically as we moved through the course.

The groups were simply instructed to create and share a Google Presentation (PowerPoint) with each other and myself (for presentation purposes). It was to be a simple 4-5 slide presentation. They had not been given any advice in how to use the Google Docs tool as they were at a stage where they could work this out for themselves. There were to be 9 presentations in all.

As we progressed through the course and the presentations we were able to discuss “what makes a good presentation”. Some of the students really picked up on this and went for good visual slides complemented by some brief notes which they read as the slides showed.

I felt that this was a good use of the Google Docs tool as it was done collaboratively by the students and completely out of class and it also complemented what we were doing in class. The students took the task seriously and really came to the party. Note: There was NO ASSESSMENT involved in this at all.

I have published their presentations. Here are the links to give you an idea of what they produced:

Peter Fraser
Sidney Holland
Walter Nash
Keith Holyoake
Jack Marshall
Norman Kirk
Wallace Rowling
Rob Muldoon
David Lange

Plenty more to come on Google Docs for Collaboration…