We have been using Google Apps for Education at Pt England School for 3 years now. Russell signed us up when we were at the GooglePlex in California in 2008 - how's that for sitting right next to the help desk!
We began our implementation in a leisurely fashion, bringing onboard those who always put their hand up for new things first and then supporting the rest of the team to start using it. But it was when the students became Google Apps users that the fun began because everyone was so keen. And the teacher's Google Docs home pages were swamped with documents shared by eager students.
We were very fortunate to meet up with Jan Zawadzki early in this journey and hear about Teacher Dashboard which his company, Hapara, was designing as an add on to Google Apps. And we were quite vocal in telling him our ideas about how it could be improved to make our teaching lives easier! We get so many questions about it from other educators that we finally got round to putting this video together to give a Pt England School perspective on how we are using Teacher Dashboard.
This event was held on June 25 at the Googleplex in Mountain View, California- and I was fortunate enough to attend! So before I post about what we did there and the things I saw and learned, a little background... I first saw the event mentioned on Twitter and thought little more about it until I realised that on that date I would already be in San Francisco on my way to NECC08 and started looking into whether it was possible to apply. The online details looked like it was worth having a go, so I spent an afternoon putting together my 60 second application and posted it to YouTube along with all the others. This is what I made (with quite a bit of help from my friends as you can see) and I have also uploaded it to Flickr so that I can share a higher quality version here than we get from YouTube. The theme was "Motivation and Learning" It was an exciting moment to get the email back from the Google team to say that the application was successful and I would be able to join the group of Google Certified Teachers. Even better was an email from Jan in New Zealand with a reward for the 3 students who helped me out with it. You can see them in the photo holding their bears in Google T-Shirts. I have linked to Flickr and podcast posts these guys have made. Jordan, Jama'l from Room 17 and Leoden from Room 15 at Pt England School.
