Google+ in the Classroom

On January 27th my cohort put on the Educational Technology Showcase at Brock University in Hamilton. This showcase ran three sessions over the day throughout the school on different ways to integrate and teach with technology in the classroom. It was a fantastic event that attracted more than 400 in attendance. I was fortunate enough to be a presenter alongside my friends Adam Childs and Natalie Gilbert on "Google+ in the Classroom". This was such a wonderful experience, and was so enjoyable. We presented in the Google room where there were six centres set up and the attendees rotated through our tables to get a quick 15 minute introduction to the topic. We decided to focus on three aspects of Google+: Circles, Hangout, and Integration with the Google Family.

Circles are effective in creating literacy learning circles, school council circles, parent circles, student circles, TLCP, etc. By doing so it allows you to control who see's what information, and communicate more efficiently with your students, peers, parents, support staff, etc. An example of how a literacy learning circle could work is to have the students create a circle, where they can share information such as youtube videos, interesting articles, questions, idea's, etc; and all can comment and work collaboratively together through this. The benefit of circles is you control the privacy of the information. This is very important due to the vulnerability of information and students, therefore this added safety allows you to share information with only who you want. For example, a conversation with a parent is a private conversation, and should not be privy to others. To highlight this, if you post something on someone's wall in Facebook, everyone who is a friend of that person can see it. In Google+, you can control this completely. Moreover, no one knows what circles you have - it is only viewable to you as a means of organization.

The benefits and flexibility of Google Hangout allows up to 10 participants in an online video conference. Unlike Skype where you can only chat to one other person, Google+ allows you to chat with up to 10 participants simultaneously. We see this as an excellent way to have students conference on projects, meet with parents outside of school hours (increased flexibility), have school staff meetings (if someone is home sick they can still participate), or discuss questions with students outside of school hours. To be clear with these outside school hours, you would set up guidelines on when you are available with all the stakeholders. This will improve transparency, and will avoid any misunderstandings. Another benefit is you can use screenshare, which allows the other video participants to view your screen to share video's, word document ideas, or anything else you wish to share. There is also the chat feature on the sidebar for those without functioning video camera's to participate with.

Google+ works seamlessly with all other Google products. You can easily incorporate, embed, and link to all other Google products in Google+, for instance add a doc, form, blogger, YouTube clip, or calendar. In our session I focused on discussing the benefits of the Calendar whereby you can create and share multiple different online calendar's with whomever you like. What I like about this is you would not want to share your calendar with colleagues, parents, and students that has your friend's birthday party on it, or a dentist appointment. So by creating say a "School Staff Calendar" and only sharing that with your school staff that calendar could include staff meetings, emergency meetings, school PD days, fundraising days, etc. Moreover, you could create a "Classroom Calendar" that includes when you have a math quiz, a field trip to the library, parent-teacher conferences, sports events, or online availability for additional help. This calendar could be shared with your students, parents, teachers, and administrative staff. This will create terrific transparency for what is going on in the classroom, and help parents be more aware of their child's learning.

It was a terrific experience presenting on this topic, and my co-presenter's and I learned so much. As the day progressed we started thinking of new and creative ways to use Google+ as a home base for all other Google products. An analogy I thought of was Google+ is the parents, and all the other Google products are the children and relatives that come home and share every once and while. So documents, presentations, flickr, blogger, etc, all are independent and grown up living their own lives; but they come home for a great Sunday lunch every week to share their ideas.

The Showcase had such an amazing atmosphere and buzz in the air, and I'm so thrilled I was able to be a part of it. It was fantastic walking around seeing all the different learning and centres going on, and hearing all these new ideas being discussed with such enthusiasm. I'm so proud of my fellow cohortian's who also presented at the Showcase, and cannot wait to take these ideas into the classroom.

If anyone has any other idea's on ways they have used Google+ in the classroom, or experiences on how to scaffold it I would be very interested in hearing about them. Cheers!