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’ve been elbow-deep in PLCs this week, and I’m receiving a world-class education on the model. Dr. Rick DuFour has been incredibly gracious and responsive to the questions and comments from all the participants, even my half-baked remarks. Bill Ferritter, the host of the conversation (and the author of a new PLC book), has contributed with encouragement toward every participant and even made some rather raw confessions about his own practice. It’s amazing and inspiring to hear such honest reflection from a North Carolina teacher of  the year.

Several key ideas stand out in my mind so far:

• For all the emphasis on standardization, high stakes testing, and common assessment in the popular discourse education, DuFour is really promoting a balanced approach to assessment. We need both standard and individualized assessments to really know what students know.
• Technology will be our friend. Eventually.  I seem to remember Rick mentioning technology as a catalyst for improvements in student achievement. However, both DuFour and Ferritter mentioned that computer software needs to gain in quality and sophistication before teachers and students can realize their full benefits in a Professional Learning Community.
• They don’t call them communities for nothing. Dr. DuFour explained in very clear terms the reasoning behind the selection of the word “Communities” in the title of his groundbreaking book and model: it’s about people and their values and beliefs, not just structures and efficiency.

I know I dogged VoiceThread for being clunky and slow, but I’m enjoying the the tool more and more. Despite VT’s minor shortcomings (no RSS, crashes my system), I’ve found myself planning the times when I can check back to read and listen and watch new comments and questions. I can only blame the crashy-ness on Adobe and my dinosaur of a PowerBook.

VoiceThread - Revisiting Professional Learning Communities at work