Joel Zehring

My district is shopping for a student email solution, and I think Google Apps Education Edition should be at the top of our list of possible tools. The following is an email draft that I’m planning to send to the members of our district technology advisory board prior to their next meeting, where I’ll give my Google Apps presentation. Cold-start meetings waste a ton of face-to-face time, so I’m hoping this email will give us some runway to launch into discussion about the best tool to meet the needs of our students and employees.

First, I’d like to frame the problem: We need a tool that engages students and employees in online collaboration. There’s a cost to using any tool, including time investment or financial investment. We need a tool that delivers extensive benefits to students and employees with minimal investment of time and money.

Next, the pitch: Google Apps Education Edition is the best solution I’ve seen for our problem. The suite includes applications for email, calendar, word processing, spreadsheets, and website design. It’s all web-based, so users can access the full-featured tools from any computer with internet connection.

Google Apps are designed around collaboration, rather than just providing individual productivity. Conversations over email are threaded to show the back-and-forth dialog. Multiple users can edit a single document or spreadsheet simultaneously. Internal and public publishing is built in to every application for quick, secure sharing with a class, a school, the whole district, or the whole world. Best of all, Google regularly updates its applications with new features and improvements, so we know that we’re investing in a tool that will grow as our needs grow and change.

I’ve included a few links below if you would like to learn more before our meeting:

Information and examples:

• Google Apps for Education – Free email and apps for schools
• Google Message Security for K-12 Powered by Postini
• My class blog (created with Google Sites)
• IDEAL portal (Teachers can try Google Apps for free through Arizona’s Department of Education.)

Video links:

• Why Google Apps for Education? Overview of Gmail in Google Apps
• Share a Calendar Google Apps Education Edition
• Google Docs in Plain English

If I’ve missed anything, make sure to straighten me out in the comments.

I responded to Scott McLeod’s call to teachers who use video games in their classrooms. Here’s what I’ve been using lately with my students:

I use the customizable quiz games on ClassTools.net to make test prep fun and engaging. Students compete in small groups in one of the arcade-style games to qualify for a tournament of champions. And they study for Science tests.

Lisa Parisi and Maria Knee have gathered together many clever educators in their first two episodes of Conversations on EdTechTalk network.

In this week’s upcoming episode, they’ll be tackling the question of how to influence our schools toward change. I’m not sure about the kind of change to which they’re referring, but I do have some ideas about the characteristics of successful change agents in public education. I’ve grouped these characteristics (roughly) into two categories: who I am as a change agent and what I do as a change agent.

Who I am

I am a teacher of disciplined principles. As a change agent, I must be guided by transcendent beliefs and values that drive every decision I make. The trends and tools of education will change rapidly, even mercilessly. The principles of good education are the rules that shed light on those changes, exposing the good and the bad of the educational landscape at any one time. Principles are like the laws of physics that govern what floats and what sinks like a rock in education.

How can I refine and develop my beliefs and values about education? I must read books (not just the latest and greatest, but a variety of books), study educational history, and look outside of education at the world around me. In many cases, the foundational principles of education are the same foundational principles of other spheres like business, government, and religion (gasp).

I am a teacher of developing practice. With refined principles (refined like gold in a fire, not like Grey Poupon) I can evaluate and adopt teaching practices that best serve the individual students in my class. New tools and techniques for instruction continue to emerge. I must shine the light of disciplined principles on each tool that moves into my inbox (physical or email), RSS reader, or social network and decide through cost-benefit analysis whether or not it is worth trying in my practice.

To be clear, the phrase “tools and techniques” encompasses everything digital, analog, and invisible which might be used to enhance learning. The shift from a static website to a blog with comments enabled is a digital shift. The shift from chalkboards to dry-erase boards is an analog tool shift. The shift from test-based assessment to project-based learning is an invisible shift of techniques. They’re all tools, and each of these shifts has pro/con tradeoffs inherent in the exchange from old to new. The challenge is to avoid throwing out effective “old” tools for flashy “new” tools that seem more useful, but may prove more harmful than helpful.

In Part 2, I’ll talk about specific actions I can take to be a change agent in my school.