Google Teacher Academy: exhausting but inspiring

If this was the only thing to take away it would have been valuable, but this was merely the start of a hectic day and half of intense learning. On seeing the first session on the agenda, a 30 minute presentation on searching, many of us felt confident we knew what we were doing and would be eased into things. 30 seconds in to the talk and my brain was already overflowing with ideas and potential classroom uses for the myriad of undiscovered options for a simple search. Did you know you can present results on a timeline? What about as a spider diagram of related search terms you can just click on to refine your results? How about the fact you can specifically search images for different colours, or even faces?!

The pace was breakneck, but the day was well structured between whole group presentations, group sessions and talks from delegates about their uses of google tools in real schools and classrooms. This was not a conference where you sat and simply listened either. Everyone had a laptop, and every presentation was accessible during the event from a website, allowing and actively encouraging people to be exploring examples, trying out ideas and discussing using Twitter during the presentations themselves. This allowed a remarkable degree of interactivity (another thing to take away to school settings), and allowed us to keep going at an incredible pace for a whole 10 hours of sessions.

On a personal note it also allowed my presentation featuring videos of children in my school to have been sent across the world to the team that develops the tools we have been using      before the 5 minute talk was up! One of the highlights of the day was getting a message from the worldwide product manager of google docs saying my pupils had ‘made [his] day’, and these children from Birmingham were pretty talked about across the company!

Throughout the day I learned a huge amount about google tools, and am now convinced of the notion I had before that google’s free ‘Apps’ suite of online tools has more than the potential to replace the often unwieldy and expensive Virtual Learning Environments used by many schools in this country. The potential for realtime collaboration i have described previously on my blog on its own goes beyond anything I have seen from commercial VLEs, but the addition of Photoshop and even garage band like applications (with the free Aviary) takes this into the stratosphere.  I will be blogging soon about some of the ‘technical tips’ I picked up, but ultimately I think the important thing is the uses of them, which will take me some time to continue to develop in a way that is useful and relevant to learners.

The biggest thing I will take away from the event is the atmosphere of creativity and democracy which sees everyone from the recently qualified NQT to the seasoned google-employed expert as life long learners with something to give and someone to take from each other. The collaborative nature of the Google Apps tools is what first turned me on to them, and it is what continues to excite me in terms of their place in a forward thinking, learner centred education system.

So I am now a google certified teacher, and the next step is making an action plan of how I will use this knowledge and status to further benefit the pupils in my local area. I have many plans for how I will implement what I have learned in my own classroom, and my own school. However, I am also looking to take this further and am keen to work with other teachers and schools who might be looking for tools to facilitate a learner centred, collaborative culture in their settings. If this sounds like something you are aiming for in your setting, and you are looking for a lead learner to collaborate with you on it, then please get in touch!

For more information:

GTA UK Event page – Featuring all the presentations and resources we used on the day, free to access for everyone.

My ‘Inspiring Ideas’ presentation – featuring Birmingham children talking about Google Docs.