Google Apps for Education California Summit

I'm at the Google Apps for Education conference and just had a great first day. I feel like almost all the talks I went to have been just about at my level. I've used several of the Google apps for simple projects and so this is building on my prior knowledge. Today, my goal was to figure out if the Google Suite could replace an LMS in our school. We are mostly ungraded, so the emphasis on grades in commercial LMS environments is unappealing to us. In addition, we've been experimenting with various Google tools and this would take us to the next level.

Today I started out with Lisa Highfill who gave a talk called Using Blogger and Google Apps to Revitalize Your Reader's Workshop. It was a great start for my day because she modeled a lot of good ideas for slowly integrating these tools. You can see her links here.

Next I went to Brian Van Dyck's talk called Google Sites One Stop Lesson Shop. This was basically how to put all your lessons online as a Google Site and have places for kids to upload their files. I gleaned a lot from the example site he showed us, but I wish he had gone into more specifics of how to build it from the ground up. You can see his slides here. There's a good set of tutorials for Google Sites.

After lunch, I went to Kate Cheal's Google Flip Packs talk. I really liked the format she used which I think has the right balance of information and interactivity. Instead of just watching videos as homework, she has kids responding to the videos on Google Forms and she puts everything together in the nice five slide presentations. You can see her slides here.

Finally, I went to Mark Wagner's talk on Google Docs for Educators. I really like how Mark gives lots of practical how-to's. His notes are here.

By the end of the day, I found I was convinced that Google could do almost everything I wanted except threaded discussions. Lisa Highfill solves this problem by replying to students' initial online response in class or by using Edmodo for threaded discussions. I felt that Brian's and Kate's talks provided a suggested structure for integrating various tools into a site or presentation respectively.

Now to plan what I want to learn tomorrow!