Google Apps Ideas

Since joining the "sandbox" group (out of the goodness of the CIT folks hearts) I have been thinking about ways to integrate google tools into learning/collaborative activities. I have previously required learners in my course to create and maintain a blog as a part of the course expectations. I have learned a great deal from these graduate students as they share their ideas, experiences and discoveries via this medium. More than likely I will continue this practice in courses that lend themselves to this form of communication.

A newer collaboration for me has been to co-write a grant application using Google Docs. Some collective reflections from this process I plan to share with the "sandbox" group during the last session.

I also am in the process of designing a guest class presentation in colleague's classroom next week and have decided to create and publish my plans through Google docs for the class participants. I may decide to publish a survey before class to get a sense of the participants knowledge and interest around several of the topics. The survey will most likely be created using another tool than Google.

The final idea for this posting is that I would like to see if there is interest among faculty in the College of Education to explore Google for Educators. If there is interest, this may turnout to be something similar to the "sandbox" experience we have been having these last several weeks.

EMail practices

After hearing Grover talk about gmail and how he is using this for all his email, I have decided to try this out for myself. I am a Macintosh user by preference and enjoy using Leopard's email client. I am in the process of testing:

• forwarding all my JMU email to my Google mail account. (I have consistently run out of space with my JMU account and hopefully this will allow me to keep email as long as I want to)
• I still wish to use the Leopard (Apple) email client so I am testing my configurations so that I can send mail either from my JMU address or from my Gmail account using this email client.
• I am unclear about where copies of my sent-mail messages go when I use my JMU account - I suspect these still remain on the JMU server (can anyone clarify this?). If this is the case I will most likely will have to move these over manually to my gmail account.
  

Well I will see how my email adventures go this week and then decide if this practice is worth continuing for me.

Our Stories

I am intrigued by the newly announced web repository of "Our Stories": a collaboration between One Laptop per Child, UNICEF, Museum of the Person (Brazil) and Google. My understanding is that this site exists to share personal stories from around the world - hopefully getting 5 million individual stories. This sounds like a very engaging, illuminating resource for education.

What do you think of this? How about sharing your story or your student's stories or their interviews with significant people in their life. There is a guide for students and adults to assist in this process. The laptops from OLPC will have the capability to capture these stories digitally and then post them to the site. (this is still being implemented it seems).

Listen, Learn, Live... (seems to be their tagline) not a bad life philosophy!

Multiuser Google Earth mashup

I just ran across a mashup for GoogleEarth - "Unype" (pronounced 'unite') where you can interact with others in GoogleEarth. I have not tried this out yet but from the description it seems like you can talk (through Skype), chat, share videos, take others on a tour, mark locations, represent yourself as an avatar... ala SecondLife. (maybe the next generation) This might be a great way for your class to go on a virtual tour with someone guiding you in Google Earth. How about visiting with someone at their home (re-created in Google Sketchup) - practice speaking German, French, Spanish or exploring the universe with an astronomer (Google Sky). Seem all like interesting possibilities. What do you think?

Personal Learning GPS system

Traveling to Ohio this Thanksgiving gave me opportunities to muse (traffic was a mess) and interact with extended family members. Well my father-in-law just purchased a handheld GPS navigation system by Garmin that he was "showing off". Incidentally my father-in-law is 81 years of age - still has the gadget bug in him. At any rate we were playing around with it - exploring different routes and walking around where there were no roads and seeing what the readout was like.

Got me thinking about a device that would "map" my own learning and compare my "routes" with others who were wanting to arrive at a similar location. How would this unit function?

Say I want to find out more about alternative fuel options for powering automobiles? I pull out my personal learning GPS and enter the destination. Now this unit knows that I have particular learning preferences (I like to watch movies) and so it is biased toward locations with these characteristics. It also knows where I have been before and automatically makes "connections" to my explorations of wind turbines last year when I was traveling in Denmark and noting the many windmills around the country. Do some of my previous discoveries have any bearing on this new route.

Now I have some "friends" who I keep in touch with regarding their learning travels, so Sally has explored some issues with alternative energy and my GPS downloads her "route" and compares this with my travels. Where has she gone and does this give me any "stop overs" that pique my interest? I discover that she has looked into personal hovercrafts that use magnetic energy - fascinating! I decide to briefly look into this on a detour, but plan to return to other topics that include more common technologies of power cells, hybrid technologies, etc. which are more common travels for many (analogous to our Interstate road system).

I can save my learning route, share this with other friends, document this with tags, save it later (actually this is automatically done on my learning GPS system) and re-join the journey next week when I have more time.

Ok - what do you think? Does this tool have any potential for development? Again, just another musing along the way. (maybe there were too many traffic jams on the way home...)

Everyone get connected

This will not be a particularly new topic but it is my story today. Having meetings in the District of Columbia today, I had a break in my schedule of running around the city to look for a place to connect and de-compress. My first criteria was "free internet" access. (I believe the Starbucks charges - right?) Anyway I don't believe that I am unusual in that preference (at least I indicated on an online survey to the cafe that I would come back because of this service). This got me thinking about how we might end up choosing educational settings... parents choosing schools that provide one-to-one computing and free internet access to all homes in the school district. Lemon Grove school district may not be the only one but that is exactly what they are doing now. A low cost "e-pad" is given to students only after their homes have been configured to connect to the internet for free. This is particularly noteworthy and I if had school-aged children I would consider moving there!

How might your classroom activities change with this tool available at school and home for each of your students? It will be interesting to follow this (and others) district and see how they utilize these tools for learning.

Cell Phone rationale...

Recently I had to provide a rationale for a purchase of an iPhone for the ETMC. In my mind this was pretty obvious if I am to be up on emerging technologies for the College of Education. In my research for this rationale I discovered this web site listing the new cell phone subscriptions per minute around the world. Of interest to me is that North America (46/min) was not the leader in new subscriptions, rather it was behind Latin America, Eastern Europe, Africa, and Asia/Pacific (whopping 388/min). This information was on the Forbes web site with credit being given to Gartner Research Group.

Another study that I perused was from the EDUCAUSE Center for Applied Research in a study titled “The ECAR Study of Undergraduate Students and Information Technology, 2007". This survey included 27,846 students from 103 institutions. Some interesting tidbits that stood out for me was a chart listing what electronic devices students own. The items included: simple cell phones (86%), desktop computer (61%), Laptop computer (74%), electronic music/video device (76%), electronic game (56%), PDA (12%), Smartphone (12%). I was also intrigued with the findings regarding the number of the above listed devices owned per student – three devices (22%), four devices (39%) and five or more devices (29%).

Ok – this was a “duh” conclusion… we better recognize that these tools are ubiquitous among our learners so how are we to leverage these tools for learning? What are your thoughts? How many learners in your classroom(s) have these electronic devices at their disposal? You could use InspireData to collect this information pretty quickly among your class participants. It would be interesting to compare notes then…