Using Google for Lesson Planning

Google Wave

Google has announced beginning of this month that along with the public preview, Google plans to integrate Wave into some businesses and schools Google Apps accounts. Not all companies will have access until next year, but if you’d like to register interest for the first round of access, you can do so here.

In case you haven’t heard of this, here is the video of original presentation at the Google I/O conference.

Dharumavantha School to adopt Google Apps for Education in 2009

Since I started in my position as a assistant principal at Dharumavantha School, I was losing my focus for some time. I was spending most of my time reading and exploring managerial skills, motivational strategies for teams, students and other administrative and leadership issues. A week after the end of this academic year, I am back on my IT focus and exploring, playing with new and innovative products, solutions available. Since I have been fan of google products for quite some time now, I started my exploration by looking into Google products. I am thrilled at what google has to offer to schools and little ashamed that I didn’t learn about this earlier.

Google has been successfully creating products that are simple to use and reliable. They create products that users eventually feel they can’t live without. What they have done with Google apps is something that has not been done before. I was looking for a reliable and cheaper email hosting service for my NGO, Edhuru Annex for quite sometime and I started my Google Apps experimenting with Edhuru Annex domain. In less than 2 hours, I am all set and using email services, calendar and google docs.

One big concern I had in mind was regarding the nature of “FREE” services. What if Google decided that education had to pay sometime down the track?  As I looked for an answer to this questions it was clear to me that it will be highly unlikely that Google will force educational institutes to pay for their services because they use open standards throughout the Google Apps.

Next task is to setup this services for my school. I know it will be more time consuming than edhuru domain because hosting services provided by dhiraagu is restricted unlike many others. I need to email dhiraagu technical support to configure the domain to point at google.

My target is to make it ready before school re-opens for new academic year 2009. When our teachers return in January, each of the staff will have an account allowing them to communicate and collaborate easily and effectively. After launching it for teachers and staff, we will start the services for our students too.

This will make Dharumavantha School, the first school in the Maldives to partner with Google to provide services and first school to provide email accounts for all staff and students.

Google Apps Quick Tour

Chris Iremonger speaks at Google@school – Google Apps Demo

Why not use Google Docs?

I am testing google docs with one of my former students. I am helping him with his final project and using google doc I am able to collaborate for free. He is a total stranger to google docs, but now we both are working on this project, even when are several miles apart in two different continents.  I very much enjoyed using google docs applications. I have found the applications very useful in the past as a collaborative tool. I feel that this is a great tool for anyone as it completely free. Anyone with Internet connection can easily use this tool. Another great advantage of google docs is that its so easy to learn because its similar to Microsoft Office in some ways. It will be interesting to know how professors, teacher, and students use these tools for learning and teaching.

I really am surprised that I don’t see more of these tools being used. I really wonder why? Are they too complicated? Are teachers frightened of web based applications? OR have they just not caught on yet?

Here is a simple introduction to google docs for those of you who are not very familiar with it.

Collaborative function of Google Maps

Some new functionality is added to Google Maps. The wiki-like functionality added to My Maps tools is similar to what is used in google docs and makes it easier to collaborate with others. I consider this to be a very useful feature for all of us who love mapping tools, tagging showing real-time activity on maps. Here is how it looks and don’t worry its so simple that you will definitely love it once you try it.