#gafesummit Albany, Auckland, NZ has been my life last few days. With tweachers tweeting up a storm sharing all the valuable learning and amazing presenters, if you have any teachers on twitter or Google+ who have attended I'm sure it's been hard to miss.
We picked up our presenter badges, I was disappointed to learn the GAFE badges were not coming and that we wouldn't be using them as presenters. I was really looking forward to seeing how adults (esp. teachers) react to the physical and virtual badge system. Our day started with the keynote and Waveney winning Andy the enormous Android plush toy. Then we all filed off to our first breakouts.
Google and The iPad: A Friendship Made in the Cloud - Holly Clark
Holly talked a lot about the connections that can be made between an iPad and cloud based tools. Most apps will let you save your pictures/videos/creations to some form of cloud, be it dropbox/drive/icloud etc. She believes Google Docs on the iPad is key to collaboration. Google is only any use to you if you are collaborating though (and remember that they are constantly updating things, twice a day). The top 5 apps she recommends are Explain Everything, Socrative, Book Creator, Google Classroom and Drive. Everything you create on an iPad can be sent to Drive using the add or sharowarrow hieroglyphics.
Connecting the dots: Using Hapara - Teacher Dashboard - Anna Spier
A fascinating look into Hapara which is a dashboard for teachers to oversee Google Docs being used by their students in Google Apps for Education accounts. She explained how she started out with her digital classroom and introduced how she got her class started with Google Drive. I was interested mainly in what Hapara is and how she was using it. I really enjoyed the student/teacher feedback aspect. Highly recommend that anyone who is keen to know more gets in touch her her via her blog or twitter (@missspeir).
Getting Down to Earth With Google Earth and Maps - Wes Warner
Google Earth is not currently working on Chromebooks at the moment. What an amazing session this one was. Wes shared a few different things that you can do using Google Earth/Maps. He showed us how to bring up the Apollo Space Missions to share with students, the bring up all kinds of film/photos and information. You can explore the whole moon on your own if you want. He showed us ways to track climate change, and even a whole lot of historical places you can visit and view photos of. You can add different layers and 2D becomes 3D with layers. You can even create Google Tours https://tourbuilder.withgoogle.com/. Highly recommend checking out Wes Warners work and the amazing things he does with Google Earth/Maps (@I_teach_ict).
Day Two off with a Bang
Yesterday I filled in a form for NewEraIT, I was told they would be giving out two chromebooks this morning. I told everyone I was pretty excited to get a new chromebook for my new GAFE Summit chrome bag, I even called out to my flatmate as I left in the morning that I would see her in the evening with my new chrome book. Never in a million years did I actually think I would win one! I was a little nervous about the keynote running late and having enough time to get set up for my session so my mind was preoccupied but when NewEraIT appeared at the front I was still in full jest mode about it being mine. When my name was called I was so excited! A brand new chromebook and it was all mine! It will be put to good use.
Gearing your staff up for working with Google Apps - Natasha Walden
I was really happy with my session and how it ran. I managed to get round to almost everyone before the session started to see where they were at with GAFE in their schools and what they were hoping to get out of the session. I got some fantastic feed back on how helpful the session was and the resources that I shared. I was happy with the session because I managed to get it finished in under 40mins so that we had time for questions and the badge challenge. That meant that people had time to digest what I had said and run through what they might have questions about. Thanks so much to Waves/Anna/Sonya for supporting me and for everyone who attended. I'm so happy that there were no hiccups and that resources created can be resources shared. Feel free to contact me if you have any questions @missnwalden.
I love the idea of badges as learning pathways. Waveney shared her journey with the Newmarket Primary School leadership programme. She shared the leadership passport she created and explained how it worked. Then she shared the digital badges she had created to go along side the passport. She shared some student examples and showed how she created her badges, the highs and the lows. I loved the digital pad I got for attending her session. I highly recommend that anyone who is keen to know more gets in touch her her via her blog or twitter (@wavesbryant).
Using HTML on your Google Site - Karen Belt and Matt Goodwin
These two amazing PRTs shared various ways you can change your google site using HTML without having any prior knowledge of it. They talked about how you need to plan our your site first so that you know where you are heading. When using HTML you come across Tags - these occur within the brackets - the closing tag always has a slash - there are exceptions - e.g. br (line break) doesn't have a closing tag. If you want to learn more about HTML you can check out a site they created: https://sites.google.com/a/ptengland.school.nz/htmlexamples/home
Video is the new text, a Q & A session with Sonya. - Sonya Van Schaijik
A fantastic session about YouTube with the wonderful Sonya. It was a very hands on session which I loved, we looked at how to get our custom URL and how important it is to get to your 500 subscribers. After claiming custom URLs we also looked at creating channel art and how to add a subscribe button. I highly recommend that anyone who is keen to know more gets in touch her her via her blog or twitter (@vanschaijik).
Overall it was a fantastic summit and I'm looking forward to the next one.
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