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DR. HENRY THIELE: True, some of the examples of lessons
from our actual classrooms where teachers are using
Google Apps for Education as one of the tools in the
instructional methodology.
The school district that I'm at is Maine Township District
207, which is in Park Ridge, Illinois.
You can see in the bottom corner here, O'Hare Airport.
So we're in close proximity to O'Hare.
We have three large high schools, and we've been in
this area for very long time.
One of our buildings, Maine East High School,
was built in 1929.
So we are long time members of our community.
Our mission in our district that we go by
is to improve learning.
And that's easy to see when you take a look at our 1,500
staff members, our administrators, are all very
progressive educators, doing whatever it takes to make a
difference in each child's learning experience, which is
part of the reason we move towards Google
Apps and Google Docs.
Because it's a whole new set of tools
to use in our classroom.
Google Apps for Education is a whole suite of tools that
Google gives away to schools for free.
We're using all of these tools in various ways
throughout our schools.
Today's instructional examples will be
some high school lessons.
We are three large high school buildings.
That's what makes up most of the district.
Although many of the lessons you're going to see today
could be scaled to a different grade level.
Really you're going to see some different instructional
strategies.
And that's going to be the focus of today's webinar, is
the actual instructional examples.
Some of these will be replacement type technologies,
where you just took a lesson and you replaced what you
would have done in the classroom before with the
technology.
And some of it is transformative type lessons
that, without the technology being there, there's no way
you could have done the lesson like this.
But either way the focus today will be on instruction.
We're going to go through many of the different tools that
Google Apps EDU uses though to support those
instructional examples.
A lot of them center on Docs which includes, for today's
example, spreadsheet forms, documents, presentations.
You're going to see an example of a teacher using the Google
site that integrates a chat into that site.
We're going to show you a little bit about video that
we've used in the classroom.
And then all of this hinges on Gmail, the fact that all of
our students and teachers have Gmail accounts and can
communicate that way and share that way.
If you're interested in learning more about Google
Apps for Education, go to that link at the bottom,
google.com/a/edu, and you'll be able to get all the
information you need about these products.
The focus today though is to go beyond the tools and to get
into the instruction.
What you're going to see today is a lot of examples that are
not centered around content but are centered around
problem-based or project-based learning examples.
We use a lot of cooperative learning in our schools.
We like to think of ourselves as leaders in cooperative
learning and we've spent a lot of time doing staff
development on that.
So you're going to see those types of themes working their
way through these lessons today.
As we do these, technology will be a tool in
accomplishing the goal.
The tool is not the focus of these instructional lessons,
it's just a means to the goal.
And you're going to see students using technology in
very powerful ways as they try to accomplish the
goals of the lessons.
It's not drill and kill type of activities
you're going to see.
You're going to see the technology being integrated
into solving the goals and meeting instructional goals of
the lesson.
The first one of these is a problem-based learning
activity done in a marketing class at Maine East, developed
by a team of teachers but was shared with me by John Schwan,
who is a business teacher at Maine East High School.
And the marketing class set out to solve the problem, well
actually to find the problem, and then solve it.
So their idea was to contact the coaches at Maine East and
say, is there something the marketing
class can do for you?
And what happened was we had the head soccer coach reach
out and say to the marketing team, yeah I'd like for you to
help market our team and to help me solve a problem.
See, the problem is that Maine East High School has one of
the top ten soccer programs in the state of Illinois.
However, they weren't really drawing a lot of
people to the games.
This is what the stands kind of looked like when a
game was going on.
So, Coach DiPrizio said, hey, find out for me why attendance
is so low and see if you can get some more kids there.
So, the marketing class put together a whole research
program to go out and find out why aren't kids going to the
soccer game.
And they gathered a whole bunch of information.
They used Google Forms, is really the backbone of
gathering that data, sent out through email to students and
staff at Maine East High School.
They gathered all of that data back through Forms. And Forms
dumps all of that into a spreadsheet, where you can see
some of the data results here, from what they were gathering.
So they gathered all of this data about Maine East Soccer
and they found out, yeah we all know it's a good team, but
the experience isn't what we want it to
be to attend a game.
So the marketing class formed a marketing team and put
together a marketing plan.
And they created this plan for Soccerfest, to try to get
people to turn out to a soccer game against one of the other
local high schools.
And they put together a whole promotional plan, which
involved a lot of material around the school, some radio
spots on our school's radio station, and they put together
a video that was then put on YouTube.
We used YouTube at the time because Google Video wasn't
part of Google Apps EDU at that point.
However, now it is.
Google Video is part of the Apps Edu Platform, and we
could have put it in there at this point.
So they produced this YouTube video.
They put it out there.
They do the whole marketing push to get
people out to the game.
And we have over 750 students turn out to cheer on their
soccer team.
We had a packed house that night.
We raised a bunch of money for charity at the same time.
And the team won, as they usually do.
So that's an example of finding an authentic problem,
using tools to gather information about that, and
you need those collaborative tools to do it in that way.
And then using the information that they gathered to go out
and solve an authentic problem.
We're going to slide over elsewhere in the building over
to the Science Department.
Aida Awad is the Maine East Science Department Chair.
She did an activity on soils called The Real Farmville, a
pretty traditional science lesson, where you're going to
take different crops and different types of soils and
try to determine what types of crops grow best in different
types of soils.
She has several instructional goals as you can
see spelled out there.
Many of them centering around science, not necessarily
technology.
The technology is a tool to reach the goal of
this science lesson.
It really is an analysis of soils and pH of soils, and
what types of crops grow best in those types of soils.
Take a look at some of the NETS standards, the technology
standards, that correlate with those instructional goals.
We are going to do this a couple of times through the
webinar today so you can see we're meeting both
instructional goals.
And yes, there are technology goals that are met just
because of the tools we're using to accomplish the goals
of the lesson.
Here are some of our students actually gathering data on the
experiments.
You can see we do have several Netbooks floating around our
schools for these types of activities.
They work real well with these cloud-based applications.
So here, students actually analyzing the soil, getting
ready to start growing their crops in
those different soils.
So what they did was they used a Form to dump data into a
spreadsheet.
I'm going to hop out here and show you the
spreadsheet in a second.
You can see we have many different labs groups turning
in data from several different days, about different types of
crops and soils.
Pretty typical science experiment, except the fact
that they're collaborating across classrooms and across
lab groups to get all of this information in here.
And you can see there's lots of data.
And typically analyzing a set of data like this is quite
difficult to sort through and use.
But there's this cool feature in Google Spreadsheets.
If you go under Insert Gadget, you get a whole bunch of
different types of interactive charts and graphs that you can
implement in this, and one of the ones that they use I have
embedded down here on the page.
They used what's called a motion chart, which allows you
to look at several different variables at
one time on a screen.
So the types of experiments they did was, they're
gathering lots of data, pH, soil type, type of plant, pH,
height of the plant, number of leaves.
So to start comparing many different data sets on one
graph, they use this motion chart where you can take,
let's look at the height of the plant over time.
We're going to make each different
crop a different color.
So beans are blue.
Corn is green, tomato is yellow.
And then we're going to say, hey let's take a look at the
number of leaves on each plant.
So the bigger the circle down here, the more
leaves there were.
We're going to take a couple of these.
I'm just going to randomly pick a couple of groups here
to look at.
I'm not sure what the data will be here.
So we can pull out and highlight those
two different groups.
We're going to watch what happens to those
data sets over time.
Again, one with not a lot of data there, so let's pick one
that I see has some.
Back it up and watch it change over time.
So we're comparing corn and beans over time and seeing
what happens there.
So you can see very powerful data analysis tools using
visual literacy strategies to look at complex data in a
visual format, which helps the students understand this much
better than looking at just a big table of data.
We go back.
I'll show you the actual analysis they did.
So here's two lab groups that we're comparing with one
another and they took a look at what happened to their
different crops over a period of time.
So here's what the students thought
about the overall activity.
So you can see that they're feeling that this type of
activity helps them understand the concept greater.
You can see that some of the instructional goals were met
by their statements there.
And then the tool itself, you can see that students felt
that the tool helped them accomplish those instructional
goals, just by the ability for them to gather the information
and share it, edit it, compare it.
We're going to go over to Maine West High School down
the road and take a look at another business class that
used these tools.
And what they were doing in this class was trying to
simulate what it's like to try to work asynchronously, and
not face to face.
They were discussing, in business today, it's very
common for people to be working on projects together
but never meet up.
So they simulated that by putting together a project for
a business class where they took students and randomly
assigned them to each other across two different classes
that never meet at the same time.
So these partners would never meet face to face.
They would have to do everything
collaboratively online.
And what the goal of this was to run some kind of survey of
their peers, analyze the data, and create a presentation, and
then present it to their class.
Each student would give the same presentation to their
individual class without the two of them ever sitting down
at the same table and working on the project.
A lot of the goals of this activity were to learn to
collaborate, some of this asynchronous conversation, be
able to work online, and to build a product to represent
the results.
You can see some more of the NETS standards around this
activity, mostly around communication, collaboration,
and about processing data reporting,
those kind of things.
So what the students did was they worked together on a
document to come up with the questions that they wanted to
be in a Form.
And then they made Forms that worked as surveys within
Google Apps and then used our internal email system to
circulate these to our students.
We provide an address book and Google Contacts, so that
students can find their peers and their
addresses within the school.
And then they selected certain peers to fill this out.
They selected some students and teachers.
I got a couple of them depending on
what they were surveying.
And they gathered all of that data back because the Form
dumps it nicely into Spreadsheets.
And then they took the data that they gathered and created
a presentation.
So here's a slide from a Google
presentation that they created.
They created it online.
Once again, never saw each other face to face, did all
their collaborations that way.
And they built out a presentation that they brought
back into the classroom and presented to the class.
Part of their presentation was to reflect on the experience,
because this was an activity that was built to show the
challenges of communicating this way, the tools it takes
to communicate this way, as well as gathering the data and
presenting it, and creating a presentation, and then the
presentation to their class.
You can see that their experiences are very similar
to the adult experiences working this way, about how
communication can be difficult.
And when you're not sitting across from one another, it's
hard to decide who's going to divvy up the work and those
kinds of things.
So a lot of the experiences that the teacher expected from
the beginning, the students had.
And they had a kind of an authentic experience there
that matches up what's going on the business world today.
I'm going to go over to Maine South High School.
All of our schools participate in the Chicago Metro History
Fair, which is similar to a science fair but it's built
around the idea of investigating some Chicago
history and presenting on it.
Mike Biondo is one of our Social Science teachers here
at Maine South.
And he really puts together the materials for Maine South
High School's work on this project.
The National History Day Competition is a national
competition.
The Chicago competition is our local division of that.
What they do is they research some part of Chicago history
and then they need to put together an actual project
that represents their research and their discoveries.
So it's a performance slash project-based activity.
What they produce could be very, very different.
Some will make a Tri Board presentation.
Some will make models.
Some will do live performances.
Others will have papers or videos.
That's a huge variety of what they can choose from to
present their research.
The overall goal for this lesson is looking at a change
in historical time.
Networking with other students, they work
collaboratively in groups once again for this activity, to
make a product that supports their analysis and theses that
change in time.
And ultimately they're presenting it to a judge.
A whole lot of NETS standards there, the last one didn't
even fit on the page.
So this is a pretty broad activity
and it's a long activity.
It's big.
And a lot of instructional goals and NETS standards are
met in the process of creating the product.
Because it's so long, so large, so many students are
involved in it, and a lot of what the students are doing is
outside of class on this project, Mr. Biondo put
together a Google site, which is just a website just for
this project.
All of the materials that students need to complete this
are contained within the site, including exemplars from past
projects, ways for kids to collaborate with each other.
And he also has a chat on the site so that if it's outside
of school hours and they need to ask a question, they can
chat in and talk to Mr. Biondo and ask him a question real
quick and get back to what they're working on.
Here's some of the highlights from last year.
We had several local celebrities or college
professors in to judge.
You can see lots of people eventually go out and compete
with one another.
And here's some examples of the types of projects that are
realized in this activity.
This is a model of Midway, which is down on the South
Side of Chicago.
It isn't there any longer.
It used to be a big fairground, so they put
together what it looked like back in its heyday and
reconstructed The Midway.
And other students turn in tribe words, or
like I said, videos.
Here's some more examples of the type of
products that are created.
And these all go on display initially
within our school libraries.
And then they can advance beyond that.
Here's some student reflections on the actual
tools that they use to complete this project.
You can see it's important to these students that they can
go find the information when they need to.
There's not always going to be time during the school day
when they're working on this so they need a way to
collaborate outside of school, to ask for help, and to get
help when they need it.
So that site is essential for students
working on this project.
So, I've highlighted for you a couple of
specific teacher examples.
We're seeing lots more than this.
We don't have weeks to walk through them all.
This is just a couple of teachers that we picked to
show off activities, but there's many other activities
going on across the building.
A lot of student journaling through either Google Docs or
through email.
You saw some of the examples of collaboration communication
that are going on, but there's lots more than that.
What we're seeing is the school day
kind of being extended.
Students are able to go home and stay in
touch with each other.
They're able to gather data during a class and then go
home and analyze it, and collaborate with
it, share with it.
So the school day isn't necessarily ending when the
bell rings.
We're starting to delve into the idea of students building
portfolios over a long period of time, because all of their
work can be kept in Google Apps.
They can even upload files to it now.
All of our students have one gigabyte of storage space
through Google.
So if they have photos or those kind of things, they can
upload them into their portfolio and
then share them out.
Other products that are in the Google family but aren't
necessarily Google Apps, we're also seeing people naturally
connect to those, like Google Earth is a very popular
program that's used here.
In geology and geography classes, we do a lot of
graphical information system work with those things.
We use higher end applications at the high school level for
those, but we're seeing students get started on the
Google Earth tools and then advance to some of the My
World products or the ArcGIS products or
those kind of things.
In English classrooms, we're seeing a lot of teachers take
advantage of the Google Lit Trips, which are a pretty cool
integration of literacy with Google Earth.
And then in our career and technical education programs,
we use AutoCAD programs. But once again were also using
Google Sketchup as another way that kids can go home and work
on much of the same concepts with a free tool.
The virtual museum link there that you see goes with the box
at the bottom of the page.
A couple years ago, The Museum of Science and Industry in
Chicago put together a contest to design their next exhibit.
And one of our teachers, Mr. Swistak, over at Maine West,
the science teacher, had two classrooms build virtual
museum exhibits in SketchUp and submit them that way, and
both of those classrooms were finalists for that award.
And I think, overall, the biggest change that we're
seeing, because all of our students are given an email
address, they have an online identity that teachers can
identify back to who that email address belongs to,
which is opening our teachers to be more accepting of going
out and using other tools out there.
Things like wikis and nings and other tools that are on
the web that they'll foray into those and see if they can
work in a classroom to help them achieve their goals.
Because they always know who they're inviting in is one of
our students.
They can lock down those communities to certain
classrooms or groups of students and they're, I think,
much more open to looking for the other tools that are out
there, even beyond the Google tools, because they have that
Gmail address.
So overall, you know, these were some
instructional lessons.
You see we have some great lessons.
We have some great tools that Google gives us, and once
again for free, which is awesome.
And when you blend those lessons and those tools
together with great teachers that we have here, I think
they make great music in the classroom.
So that's all I had for you for the formal presentation.
I think we're going to move into the Q&A session.
I know Dana's been monitoring the Q&A inside, and I think
there's probably some moderator questions as well.
JAIME CASAP: Dr. Thiele, thank you very much
for joining us today.
I think that was a very informative--
some great examples of some great case studies, these
cases, of how teachers are using the Google Apps
Education tools in their classrooms. So we have a
couple questions.
Dana's been monitoring some of the questions that are coming
in on the chatbox but we also have some questions that are
coming in on moderator.
And I just want to let everyone who has joined us
know that Dr. Thiele's presentation and case study
and the answers to some of the questions that we're not going
to get to this morning will be sent to you in a link if
you've registered for the webinar.
OK, so I'm going to go through some of these questions, Hank,
and turn it over to you and I'll add my thoughts on some
of these, if appropriate.
The first question that we have from the group that was
voted upon was, to set up class groups, do teachers have
to enter the students in each of their classes, or is there
a program that sets the separate
classes as separate groups?
DR. HENRY THIELE: The way that we do it here is, our student
information system contains all of our
students' email addresses.
So our teachers go into the student information system and
just grab that list for each individual class and then set
up a contact group.
I believe Groups would allow you to do that at the
administrator level.
Jaime, maybe you can help me out on that one.
But that's how we do it here.
JAIME CASAP: Yes, so that's correct.
You can set up the groups at the administrative level but
also you don't have to have that control.
Teachers can actually set up their own groups as well.
DR. HENRY THIELE: Correct.
JAIME CASAP: Right.
OK, so second question is, are there any security features
built in email system?
Or is that an option?
What happens in the event of a student sending inappropriate
communications?
Obviously I have an answer for that but I would like to hear
how you guys handle that.
DR. HENRY THIELE: OK, well each school probably has
different policies about that.
Our policy here is, technology is a tool, just like paper and
pencil is, just like the phone is.
The computer is no different than any of those.
So we deal with those issues as they come up.
We have an acceptable use policy that talks about how we
deal with those.
So cyberbullying, or any of those, we would handle via
email just like it would happen if it was paper and
pencil or somebody putting something on a wall or
anything like that.
So we don't monitor for those things happening, but as they
do we treat them as discipline actions,
not technology issues.
JAIME CASAP: OK, and I would just want to add that, as part
of the Google Apps for Education package, one of the
things that K-12 school districts or schools get for
free, is the Google message security, which provide
schools the ability to filter for key words and to do the
security things that they need to do at
the appropriate level.
But as you mentioned, Dr. Thiele, the concept of
acceptable use policy, every school district is different,
everyone has a different way to set that up.
So we try to provide as much of the technology tools that
enable some of those policies to be enforced.
But at the end of the day, we can't
technologize policy features.
DR. HENRY THIELE: Right, I mean, if we wanted to we could
go in there like you said using message security, which
anybody signed up for now gets, I guess for limited
time, here.
We could go in there and set those policies where if
something was said or a phrase was said that somebody was
alerted, but we choose not to do that at this time.
JAIME CASAP: OK, the next question.
Do you-- and actually I don't know the answer to this, I'm
looking forward to hearing what the answer is--
do you have the chat feature, Google
Talk, enabled for students?
If so, in what ways has it enhanced or hindered learning?
Do you have any tips for teachers, appropriate
effective use of student chat?
DR. HENRY THIELE: We actually have chat on for our staff.
Our students are in separate domains so we control theirs
differently.
We don't have it on yet for students.
We're in a discussion currently of whether or not
we're going to turn that on.
So I'm assuming that the same questions they have are the
same ones we have. At this point, I think there's more
people leaning towards turning it on than off.
But for those of you that are familiar with how the domains
work, currently you can set up options where people can
communicate or use any of these tools, either on or off,
can use them or not use them.
So like turning chat on or off where we
currently have it off.
You have the next layer where you could turn it on only for
people within the domain, could only
work within that domain.
Or they could work with the world.
With us separating the four domains, we have one for all
Maine 207 staff and then one for the students in each of
the buildings.
It kind of limits us to, it's either off or
it's on to the world.
Because on within a single domain doesn't allow students
to share with teachers.
So we're kind of at the point where we realize if we turn on
chat, we're allowing students to chat with the world.
And we feel that we need to do some preparation with our
students next year to get them ready for that.
So we're still building that curriculum for how we're going
to give our students the skills to use that as an
appropriate tool.
And then once we feel that we've done that,
we'll turn it on.
JAIME CASAP: OK, thanks and another one of the top
questions that was asked was are your students and staff on
the same domain, so I think we covered that question as well.
I just want to let everyone know who's
following the questions.
And we covered the question of whether or not you had the
students and staff on the same domain.
DR. HENRY THIELE: No, we have them on separate domains.
And I see a couple questions about, do you do that or why
would you do that?
Our major reason for that is, our students' email addresses
are then different from our staff, which prevents a
student from impersonating as a staff member, or a staff
member for impersonating themselves as a student.
JAIME CASAP: OK, and then the next question here is, our
staff currently is dependent upon our
internal address book.
Do you find that Google Apps Contacts are an acceptable
alternative?
DR. HENRY THIELE: I'm sorry, for what kind of address book?
JAIME CASAP: So the question is that they're using an
internal address book and they want to know-- and obviously
we don't know that address book--
so really the question is, are you
using Google Apps Contacts?
DR. HENRY THIELE: As our internal address book?
Yes.
And then they have the ability to build their own address
books of course but yes, initially all of our students
have an address book of all the students in their school
and all of the staff have an address book
of all of the staff.
JAIME CASAP: Right, and the Google perspective on this--
I just want to remind everyone, that we run Google
using these same tools.
So we run our corporation, our company, using the same tools.
So we use Gmail as our email system.
We use Contacts as our address book.
We use Calendar as our calendaring system.
So I just want to remind everyone that internally we
like to call it, we eat our own dog food.
So for anything that you find in terms of issues or new
features or feature requests, or things that are coming up,
we have a bunch of engineers that are just as interested
and working on those feature requests.
All right, another question for you Dr. Thiele.
Do you have sites and groups open for
staff and student creation?
How are you handling cleanup of defunct site groups,
monitoring for inappropriate groups and sites?
DR. HENRY THIELE: We do have it open, but we don't actively
monitor for that.
When a staff member has an active account, if they're an
active staff member with us, it is their responsibility to
maintain their sites and their groups.
When a staff member leaves the organization, then we take
down anything that they have created.
Before they leave, if it's something that's essential, we
hope that they will share it with somebody else before they
head on out.
If not, whoever picks up for that person is starting over
with their own site for that.
We don't use Sites as an add-on to our content
management system.
We have a formal content management system as well.
But we allow teachers to use, not only Sites but if there's
other or web-based products, like I mentioned before, wikis
or nings or any of the other tools that are out there.
We don't limit them from what they can use.
Our goal is to have them communicating with their
students and parents as much as they can in whichever way
they're comfortable.
And things that are inappropriate, we handle those
as we discover them, just as anything else that's here.
You know, it's very difficult for an organization of our
size to prevent people from doing something that's
inappropriate.
We have policies about how we address that.
We expect our teachers to be professionals and
generally they are.
And our students are very professional with the
technology we give them.
We've had a history of email here.
Before we had Gmail, we had another email product.
We've had students with emails here for nearly 10 years and
we have experienced very limited problems with that for
the entire lifespan of email for students here.
JAIME CASAP: OK, the next question was, you mentioned
that you had your teachers and students on separate domains.
How do you manage your shared contacts?
How is it that you can share contacts across those domains?
DR. HENRY THIELE: We don't share contacts
across those domains.
So students' information is contained in an LDAP lookup,
where they can look, like in our we have a different
address book outside of the Contacts, because those
domains are separate.
Or if they need to get that information, they get it out
of our student information system.
JAIME CASAP: OK.
There was another question in here when I was through the
questions that I want to answer which was, why is
Google doing this?
What's in it for Google?
Why is Google doing this for free?
And I just want to remind everyone that Google Apps for
Education includes all the tools that Dr. Thiele was
talking about, regarding Gmail, Google IM, or Google
Talk, Calendar, Docs, Sites, Video.
All these different tools and applications that you can turn
on and turn off at your discretion.
All these tools are available for free with no ads.
We have some questions that are related to that on our
website around what do you do with our data and privacy and
all the other concerns.
We address those concerns for you on our website.
We don't mine your data.
We're not using your data for marketing purposes.
The reason that we're doing this for free, there's two
answers to that.
The first one is that, quite frankly, we're trying to build
a business and we're trying to get the future
users, if you will.
So we're building a business for life and we want to be
able to provide these tools to students because we want them
using our tools.
And we want them using--
we want them graduating high school and going to college
and going into the world, familiar with our tools.
That's what's in it for us.
The other reason that we do this is because we don't do a
lot of corporate sponsorship types of events.
We don't sponsor 10k runs.
We don't provide those types of funding resources.
What we do is we provide tools for free, especially for
education, especially for nonprofit.
So it's not just the Google Apps tools that are available
to teachers for free.
Most of our tools are available, either at a
discount rate or free to teachers, including Google
Earth and all the different things that you can do with
Google Maps and all the other Google tools that you have.
And the same is true for nonprofits.
It's our way of, if you will allow me to say, being good
corporate citizens.
So I just wanted to answer that question for anyone
that's on the call that might be a little skeptical as to
why we're actually doing this.
DR. HENRY THIELE: Jaime, let me build off of that.
I want to encourage anybody who is thinking of signing up
for Google Apps EDU that haven't already, to go and
look for the Google Apps Education Users Agreement.
That, if your school district is interested in getting
started, will answer a lot of these questions.
And I believe there's also an FAQ document out there on
common questions that schools ask.
Those two together answer a lot of the questions schools
have when they get started with this.
JAIME CASAP: Yes, thanks for that reminder.
That's true.
The Google Apps for Education Agreement is a completely
separate agreement and not at all like the consumer Gmail
agreement that's out there.
So make sure that if you're reviewing the agreement and
what you think we do with data, make sure you're
reviewing the correct agreement and the Google Apps
for Education Agreement.
So the next question for you, Hank, is, for a district your
size, what were the bandwidth implications?
How can we reasonably ensure adequate performance?
DR. HENRY THIELE: Well, for a school our size, we have
invested greatly in bandwidth.
We were initially at 20meg and we do have YouTube wide open.
So when you look at what's being used resource wise, the
majority of our bandwidth, like 90%
of it, goes to YouTube.
The other 10% is the other applications that are running
through here.
The majority of the Google applications do not seem to
use up a lot of bandwidth resources.
If we were to shut off YouTube, we would have
adequate bandwidth.
We believe that YouTube though is a valuable educational
resource for our students and staff, so we continue
to leave that open.
We started a couple years ago with 20meg
for the three schools.
We have nearly 9,000 people working here during the day,
with students and staff.
We upgraded that.
That was not enough.
We upgraded to 40 and that was enough for everything to work,
but to work slowly.
We were able to renegotiate, or to repurchase
services this year.
And we actually have a 100 in now for less than we were
paying for 40.
So bandwidth is getting cheaper.
To us, we would rather throw the money at bandwidth that
allows access to a lot of tools out there on the web
like the Google tools and other free tools rather than
invest in tools that we host and then have to maintain.
So our philosophy is, get as much stuff as we can from the
web, from the cloud, and spend money on bandwidth rather than
spend the money on servers.
JAIME CASAP: OK, so the next question for you Dr. Thiele
is, the question around thinking.
So are working on directory sync with our
active directory system.
We can't seem to get password changes synced over.
How did you deal with this issue?
DR. HENRY THIELE: We got a third party company involved.
Do you guys mind if I mentioned the third party?
JAIME CASAP: No, absolutely.
DR. HENRY THIELE: We're working with a company called
Sada systems, S-A-D-A. And we paid them a little bit of
money up front.
We're actually on Novell eDirectory, which makes it
even more fun to sync.
But they were able to work with Google's APIs and to
integrate a single sign on.
And so our staff and our students all go to one page
and their same credentials to get in to any computer in the
organization, to any of our other applications, all are
the same passwords that they use to get into Google.
So it was a little bit of money up front to do all of
those hooks and to build all that programming.
I don't have the programming staff here to do it.
But also in the process, they integrated to the point where
when we, on the network end, on our internal side, when we
create users, when we delete users, that's passed all the
way across to Google.
So there's no more extra steps in maintaining
the Google user accounts.
It's just like maintaining any of our user accounts.
It just happens all at once.
JAIME CASAP: OK, the next question for you is, do you
find that the storage provided is enough?
Have you developed, or do you think you need to develop a
strategy, for keeping it clean?
DR. HENRY THIELE: Well, storage of Docs and Sites and
all of that, we have had no problems with.
Our internal network storage, we're constantly
fighting with that.
We don't have enough for our staff and our students.
So we are looking at other net storage
applications out there.
Some of those are available through the Google Marketplace
now that will seamlessly integrate with Google Apps.
So we are looking at other options that are out there.
We're treating the gig of storage that Google gives our
staff and students as kind of a cloud flash
drive or jump drive.
We still provide limited network storage to our
students and staff, but it's not enough to offer them what
they need to work nowadays.
And that's just really expensive.
So we're looking at what other options might be out there
through other providers but that's something we're still
investigating.
JAIME CASAP: OK, the next question, a general question,
what was your main purpose for switching to Google Apps?
And what were the pros and cons that you faced at the
beginning and how would you--
and I'm adding this part of the question--
how would you look at it now?
What have you learned from the whole process?
DR. HENRY THIELE: Sure, the reason we started was, I
mentioned, for a bunch years we had an email
system for our students.
That email system, when I came on board here in 207, in 2007,
was very outdated.
It was text based.
It was cumbersome to use.
Our students didn't like to use it.
Our teachers didn't like email students stuff on it because
you couldn't email hyperlinks.
You couldn't do anything a modern email system could do.
So one of the first things I was challenged with when I
came through the door here was, we needed to replace our
student email system.
And I went out to all the usual suspects out there that
provide email accounts for students and got quotes.
And it was looking like it was going to cost about $35,000 a
year for just student email.
And we started talking about, well why are we going to spend
$35,000 a year on this when Google will give us the same
products for our kids for free.
And there was really no reason why not to go with Google.
It did everything that all the other companies did and it
came at no cost.
Plus we got the added benefit of-- we flipped on Documents
at that time for our students.
So we have a wide variety of demographics here.
So for some of our students that was a way to be able to
go to the library and work on their documents, because they
had somewhere to the type a paper.
So that was kind of like a bonus and very soon our
teachers started to realize that the student email was
better than their email.
And the students had more tools at their disposal than
the teachers did.
So the next year we turned on Documents.
But all of all of the other Apps for our teachers, except
for Mail, we stayed with Groupwise
was our email service.
And then this month, actually we're in the throes of it this
week, we are migrating over from Groupwise to Gmail, and
we are at this point about 85% of the way through that.
So by next Monday, we'll be 100% Google.
JAIME CASAP: Just to follow up on that, there's another
question in here around how long did your rollout take,
including the training features, and what did
training look like for you?
DR. HENRY THIELE: Well, for students, we made all of their
accounts and had it up and running including sign up and
everything else within three weeks.
For them, we put instructions on the website of how they
could log into their accounts.
And then they got help in their English classrooms, for
those that needed some one-on-one attention.
And then we have slowly rolled out these other applications
for our teachers.
And a lot of the teachers have just picked up
and run with it.
We have done some staff development with it.
For the Gmail migration, we've done extensive staff
development, because that's such an essential tool for
communication.
But a lot of it has been, hey we're going to offer these
sessions and please drop in.
And it's kind of the lunch and learn, before school, type of
staff development.
We do have some embedded staff development into institute
days and some from programs, like we have one that's called
ITech, where we actually pull teachers out of classrooms and
give them some staff development.
And then they learn and become trainers, to go back and use
train the trainer model.
So those are the variety of things that we use.
JAIME CASAP: OK, I'm going to try to sneak a couple more
questions in here.
The first one I'm going to answer here which is, I
registered our school district for the service but our domain
has been has been put into the free standard edition of
Google Apps.
How long will it be changed to the K-12 edition?
So I just want everyone to know, that when you go in and
sign up for a Google Apps for Education, you get the
standard edition that you have to verify that you're an EDU
and you go through this process.
And then we flip it over to an EDU account.
That process takes two to three weeks, just because of
the number of schools that we have signed on and their
verification process that we have to go through.
So we appreciate your patience as you go through that
process, but just know that if you've applied for a Google
Apps for Education domain, it's in our system.
We're turning them over.
You can continue to use--
you can play with the features of the standard edition.
But we will get you that EDU edition.
Just wanted to add that thought there.
The next question is one of my favorite questions that we
have on list today, which is, the question I get a lot when
I when I go out to talk about Google Apps for Education,
which is what kind of hardware recommendations do you have?
Can you recommend specific PC manufacturers that are best
for the Google Apps experience, low cost and
durability.
Is iPad an option?
And all the questions around hardware.
And obviously I have my thoughts but Hank, I'll let
you answer the question first.
DR. HENRY THIELE: Our standard platform here is Windows.
However, we have a variety of computers scattered throughout
the school, including Mac, including Linux Netbooks, and
it seems to work fine on all of those.
I think that it probably works best in the Chrome browser.
The feedback I get from staff and from students is that the
products run a little bit faster in that browser.
But it will run in all of the browsers, and
it runs just fine.
We have students and staff with all different ages and
types of computers at home, and I don't hear any
complaints about it not working anywhere.
So to me, it's pretty much browser and
operating system agnostic.
It'll work wherever you want to try to run it.
All you got to be able to do is to get to the web.
JAIME CASAP: Yeah, I'll add my thoughts.
I did a workshop back in Phoenix for my daughter's
teachers, and the technical director that was setting the
whole thing up and she said, half the teachers had PCs and
half the teachers had Macs, when we did the workshop,
whether or not that would be a problem.
And whether or not she needed to go out and get either the
rest of the Macs or the rest of the PCs so that we can be
consistent across the board with our PCs or Macs.
And it was great to be able to tell her that, as you
mentioned, Hank, that all we're
looking for is a browser.
And our Google Apps for Education
works with most browsers.
And so it's not specific to any specific PC or Mac.
So that's great.
The second part of that answer is also that, if you look at
Google Apps for Education today and--
for those of you are familiar with its features--
you can look at Google Apps for Education today and think
about, maybe if you've been following it for a couple
years, think about what it looked like when we launched
it a couple years ago and some of the features that we've
been able to implement the last couple years, and where
Google Apps for Education will be going in the future and all
the possibilities.
And with all those changes and all those new features that
are coming out, you just show up on Monday and it just shows
up because it's a web-based application and those features
are there for you and you can use them.
All right, we're going to wrap up.
I'd like to thank Dr. Thiele for joining us and all the
cool things that they're doing at Maine
Township School District.
Joining us again for the second time so
we appreciate that.
We want to let everyone know that if you registered and
provided us an email--
I think you had to register with an email-- we're going to
be sending you the slides, the case study.
And then we're going to go through these questions and
answer them.
So we'll be sending you the answers to the questions that
we didn't get a chance to get through today.
So, Dr. Thiele, Hank, I'd like to thank you
again for joining us.
We really appreciate your time.
DR. HENRY THIELE: No problem, thank you.
JAIME CASAP: All right everyone, thanks for joining
us, appreciate it.