Claire Amos

Video - Google Classrooms, Learner Agency & Universal Design for Learning In this day and age it blows me away that there are still high schools debating whether to introduce Bring Your Own Device (BYOD), and then it frustrates me further than when they do go BYOD and they choose to make it optional or drip feed it in level by level. Those yet to introduce BYOD are doing their students a massive disservice, potentially widening the gap between the "haves and have-nots". Young people need these skills, and considering your school probably has something in the vision or mission statement about preparing young people, you're really not delivering the goods. And as for those who are doing the slowly, slowly drip feed of BYOD, bravo for taking the first step, but you need to recognise that you are increasing your teacher's workload, not reducing it, and the chances are you are not getting anywhere near the benefits that a one to one BYOD programme can offer. ...

Google Teacher Academy, Sydney 2014 Last week I was lucky enough to attend the Google Teacher Academy in Sydney, completing two days of workshops run by the NoTosh team and a group of fabulous GTA mentors. It was a jammed packed two days where delegates were taken through the design thinking process so as to realise our ' Moonshot Thinking ' and make a plan for changing up education and us all to take our aspirations for education and multiply them by 10. My Moonshot So what did we do? The first day was mainly about taking us through the design thinking (see NoTosh explanation of design thinking here ) phases of immersion and synthesis , so as to explore and define our 'Moonshot thinking' - this was basically an issue or opportunity we saw for implementing change in education. We used strategies such as hexagonal thinking to connect/arrange our thinking about our issues and ideas before we then tried to capture our moonshot plan within a writing frame....

Tuesday morning this week I am lucky enough to be flying away to Sydney to join 49 other educators at the Google Teacher Academy. Below is the video I submitted as part of my application to be considered as one of the GTA Ambassadors for Change. So why did I apply for the academy? Whilst I am actually an advocate for educators to be as device and brand agnostic as possible, I have to admit, I do really like Google Apps for Educators. The reason GAFE appeals is simple. GAFE is a suite of tools that supports the pedagogical approach I value - co-constructed, sharing, transparent and supports student agency. The other reason I applied was the company who was taking over the GTA. This GTA is the first academy to be run by NoTosh  an international education consultancy "which challenges the status quo in schools, public services and creative companies. We work together with clients to improve the way people learn, the results of the organisation and the spaces in which...

Interestingly, when I started out at HPSS I was completely convinced that we would not need a formal LMS (Learning Management System). I believed the time of Moodle, KnowledgeNet and UltraNet was behind us. I believed that students should manage themselves and teachers and students should have free choice. I believed that providing one LMS as our main online space was simply no longer needed. Then, as time passed, I reconsidered, I started to look back on Moodle with increasingly rose tinted glasses. I remembered the structure, the untapped potential of all those activities, all those plugins. Before I knew it I was making a steady u-turn. I began thinking, yes, we do need a LMS, we need that Moodle - even if only as a front door, a front door that allowed us to mash up Google Apps, Gmail, KAMAR student portal, MyPortfolio and links to eTV and our Library Management System. Moodle, Google and MyPortfolio supported by SSO (single sign-on) became the vision once more.  With this thin...

Here is the Google Apps webinar I mentioned the other week. This is aimed at teachers who are basically familiar with Google Apps, and are ready to "take it to the next level". Check out the Google Apps channel on YouTube for many more great tutorials and webinars.

Taking the Core features of Google Apps to the next level - a free online professional development seminar! Date and time: 8 December 2010 13:30, New Zealand Daylight Time (Wellington, GMT+13:00) Program: Google Apps for Education Professional Development Duration: 1 hour Description: Taking the Core features of Google Apps to the next level. Skill level: Intermediate Lead by Michael Wacker, Google Apps for Education Certified Trainer and Google Certified Teacher We will explore 5 "killer" features to be used in a K-12 setting in 5 Google tools. Take your Google astuteness to the next level. Join us to learn tips and tricks on Search, Documents, Forms/Spreadsheets, Sites, and Calendar. Click here to register!

Great overview of Google Apps for Education! A little cheesy at times, but definitely informative!