Google Docs for Educators

Mr. "Education Virtually Anywhere" has been giving me a hard time because it has been so long since I made a post on this blog. I admit, I've been busy with other things...

At the ICCP Board meeting this past weekend I had a great conversation with Jim Bell, a fellow community college IT instructor and ICCP board member. We were chatting over dinner about all of the useful tools for students that are now available "in the cloud." With these free and accessible tools on the web, students don't need to download or purchase expensive software to complete their assignments, and online or group collaboration becomes much easier. Just about every day I learn about something new. Since I usually learn about them on other blogs and Twitter posts, I decided that I need to get back to tracking and sharing these on my blog.

One of my all-time favorite tools is Google Docs. I keep finding new and innovative ways to use it, in all aspects of my life. It revolutionalizes collaborative writing. In its most basic function, it's a suite of productivity applications - a word processor, spreadsheet and presentation builder. The applications are free and completely online - no software to download - so you can access them from any computer with a web browser (and some cell phones!).

Although useful as a suite of free applications, the real power of web-based tools becomes evident when you begin sharing. It completely changes the way you think and work with documents because you no longer save and email them around for people to make comments or updates. You "share" the document for other people to read and modify - giving specific permissions depending on what you want them to do with it. When multiple people share a document, you're all working on the same thing (not copies of the thing), sometimes even at the same time, with real-time updates. It's much like a "wiki." You can upload documents, store them online, export into a variety of popular formats and even publish them as web pages.

Google Presentations allows you to create or upload powerpoint-like documents that can be shared by publishing and sending a link to the URL to anyone you want to participate in the presentation. Set up a time, launch a Skype conference call, send out the link to participants and voila! you have a free video conference. Pulling together that group presentation assignment at the last minute becomes a breeze when you are all working on the same presentation, at the same time!

Google Spreadsheets allows you to share a spreadsheet and also lets you "chat" with others who are online editing the spreadsheet at the same time. It has the ability to create forms for gathering data and then compiles the data into a joint worksheet.

When you put these tools in the hands of students and give them problems to solve, the learning opportunities are endless. Click the link from the title of this post (or here) to see videos and testimonials on Google Docs in Education.

Professional Certification = REAL assessment!

I was inspired by James McCusker's column in the Sunday, 8/31 Herald, "Certification would help college grads prove their skills," regarding Charles Murray's book: Real Education: Four Simple Truths for Bringing America's Schools Back to Reality. As an educator, a certified I.T. professional and an advocate of industry certification, I was especially attracted to the idea of certification as assessment. It is a natural partner to the concept of "education virtually anywhere."

What I like about this idea is that it firmly places the responsibility for what a person knows on the individual rather than the education system. Certification requires a personal commitment to learning a body of knowledge and being able to demonstrate skills, measured by some independent external assessment body. In my work with our college's accreditation over the past few years, I have been actively involved in discussions about assessment and accountability in higher education. However, the focus of educational reform has often been on making institutions more accountable for success of students, rather than emphasizing the motivation for students to take responsibility for their own learning. Standardized tests such as the WASL are used to rank institutions and control funding. They do little to encourage assessment as a tool for students to manage their own life-long learning. For most traditional college students, attaining a degree has become a simple test of survival. If you can stay awake (and sober) enough to pass all your classes, and you can afford to pay for at least 4 years of college, you can get a degree. On the other hand, the professional credentialing process is all about setting personal knowledge-oriented goals and striving to attain them.

I began to imagine.... what if MOST employers valued certification credentials more than college degrees? What would that do to the world of academia?

• To exist, colleges would have to truly focus on the individual student's needs and on REAL assessment. Colleges or programs would be judged on their ability to help students prepare for externally administered evaluations, rather than graduation rates.
  
• There would, undoubtedly, be an outcry from academics who teach liberal arts and "soft" skills that do not easily translate to specific professions or certifications. Purely academic programs may have to justify their existence and demonstrate their value.
  
• Same place, same time models of teaching would be challenged. Individuals could gain the knowledge needed to attain certification from many different sources, at anytime.
  
• The cost of college would no longer be a factor. As long as you could pass the exams, it wouldn't matter if you went to school at Harvard or learned from sites on the internet.
  
• Life-long learning would be expected. There would be no need to confine your education to a 4 year program, or earn "credits" from a single institution. You could pick up knowledge on your own terms - on your own time table.
  
• Colleges would have to rethink the traditional efficiency-based models of offering programs. Maintaining optimum student-to-faculty ratios will no longer be a relevant measure of productivity for educational institutions.
  
• College's would have to really focus on the services they offer and the value they provide to learners - such as providing resources and administering assessments. Perhaps even moving toward a "health-club-like" model of subscription-based education. (See Corey's Advisory Bored blog entry "Basic Cable").
  
• For certifications to be rigorous and meaningful, employers would need to become more actively involved in the development and validation of certification assessments. Employers would have some "skin in the game."
  

Unfortunately, U.S. employers and educational institutions have a long way to go before they would embrace such a model. Except in well-established professions such as Accounting and Law, hiring managers and HR departments are often unaware of existing certification bodies or they undervalue these credentials. Changing such deeply entrenched systems and strongly held beliefs about education is a lion many have fought but few have conquered. However, as more public scrutiny is given to assessment in higher education, perhaps professional certification will gain more credibility. This is not a bad thing, and in my opinion, would send a tsunami of change throughout our traditional institutions of higher education.

Knowledge is a personal thing

Andy Williams' latest post on Visual Literacy and Informal Learning triggered some interest and exploration for me around personal learning environments (PLEs) and the power of reflecting on how we personally acquire knowledge.
As I perused through the collection of PLEs at http://edtechpost.wikispaces.com/PLE+Diagrams, I am inspired to begin working on my own personal learning environment diagram. This reinforced the concept that knowledge is a dynamic and very personal growth process. We develop new understanding as we continually challenge and reorganize our own knowledge. Creating visual diagrams is a way to reflect on our own models and make them explicit, while collecting these models in one place provides the opportunity to see patterns, analyze them and learn from them - also opening up a tiny insight into the diverse ways that people see their world. This demonstrates one of the valuable aspects of the collaborative tools we now have available in the web-enabled world. It's clear that formal education is only one node in the expanding network of learning resources.

Does this make the stereotypical role of "teacher" in our formal education systems irrelevant?

Del.icio.us Uses for Social Bookmarking

I'm warming up to social bookmarking, and I know that some teachers have been trying to understand how social bookmarking can be useful. Here are some ideas:

• Preparing for a class or workshop, I have found and tagged items that I want to demonstrate. By giving them all a specific tag I can find them easily by opening up my Del.icio.us account and clicking on the tag. Example: Workshop.
  
• I have a list of web articles that I want students to read for an assignment. I simply add them to my Del.icio.us with a special tag like "MGMT215-A1" (using a code to identify the assignment). Then when I select all items with this tag, I can create a URL just for this list and include it in my Blackboard course materials. Students don't need a del.icio.us account to view it, they simply see the list of links. I can also add comments. Example: MGMT 215 Links. You can easily reuse these links from class to class.
  
• I find articles on the web that my husband or a friend might be interested in. I simply add their del.icio.us ID to my network, and now I can add a tag "for:"+ their ID and it will show up in their list. By the way, Corey is already having fun with this one. He posted a link in my "Links for You" on "How to Effectively Load a Dishwasher." Is that a hint? :)
  
• Create a group resource account that can be shared and add the link to a blog or website. You can give the login and password out, or any group members with their own Del.icio.us accounts can share links with others by adding the group account to their network and use the "for:Groupname" tag to share specific links. See EdCC Faculty Group Page.
  
• Show students how to collect resources on Del.icio.us for group research projects.
  
• Research topics using the Del.icio.us search. Let other people's tagging help you find items of interest!

Learning and teaching students how to use tags is also an exercise in organization and categorization of information. This is a great skill, and may be a fun way to explore a variety of topics and vocabularies for different disciplines - for example, what are all of the terms and keywords that are used to described your discipline or profession?

Science on Tap

Brewery as classroom? This takes "education virtually anywhere" to a new level. As I was driving home the other day, I heard this little radio spot on KUOW about scientists holding lectures at local pubs and coffee shops such as T.S. McHugh's Pub
in Lower Queen Anne and Ravenna Third Place Books in Seattle.

What a great example of the ubiquitous nature of knowledge and life-long learning! Anybody interested in science can attend these informal gatherings and learn in a comfortable, social setting. Imagine if we could inspire students in our colleges to learn and share knowledge in this way. I can envision courses that are structured with combinations of online assessment and participation in these types of informal discussion groups at coffee houses, led by experts in their fields. Imagine if teachers were knowledge facilitators and mentors for students as they learn from all of these different resources. A college education would look a lot different than it does now.

Listen to the KUOW broadcast at http://kuow.org/defaultProgram.asp?ID=14087 (it's about 44 minutes into the show). More information about Science on Tap, including links to articles about the program and a schedule of upcoming topics can be found at http://www.scienceontap.org.

Cheers! :)

Web 2.0 in Plain English

I indulged in a brief mental break tonight from staring at accreditation documents to find a few resources for sharing at Andy's Teaching and Learning discussions this week. A while back, I found this site link on the Bamboo Project blog, and thought it was fun. The Common Craft folks have created short little videos that demystify all kinds of techie-stuff. It's worth cruising the site. Corey reminded me about this site yesterday when he told me that he used the "Blogs in Plain English" at a meeting with the Redmond Fire Department and they really enjoyed it. He is helping the fire department explore ways in which Web 2.0 technologies can be used in fire prevention education and improving communications between fire fighters in the field. Interesting stuff! A reminder that the importance of these tools for education goes way beyond academia!

What I like about these little videos is that they are very elegantly done, and there is clearly some thought about pedagogy put into them. As they say on their site, "Our product is explanation." (Hmm, that would be a nice mission statement for some teachers as well...) Their 3 to 4 minute "Paperworks Videos" introduce the viewer to concepts by using familiar metaphors. The images they use are non-intimidating things like post-it notes, whiteboards, stick figures and notepads. They are brief, providing snippets that our brains can grasp, without overwhelming them with information. Although these may look simple, it's clear that a lot of work must go into creating each video. For ambitious teachers who want to create their own content, these are great examples. For the rest of us, we can leave the "explanation" to other experts, and just link to the wonderful content that is out there to use!

Here are links to my favorites:

• Blogs in Plain English
• Social Bookmarking in Plain English
• Wikis in Plain English
• Online Photo Sharing in Plain English
• Social Networking in Plain English
  
• RSS in Plain English
  

Enough fun. Now back to the accreditation report!

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More Twittering with Teachable Moments

Since I've been connecting to other blogs, I'm finding there is an active community of edubloggers out there on cyberspace, and am beginning to recognize the same folks trying out some of these things. It seems there is a community growing on Twitter.  Right after my previous post, Corey (my husband) sent me a link to Langwitches blog entry about the Teachable Moments Shoutout.  I'm a little shy about committing to this, but I think I'll follow this twitter account and see what happens.  Sometimes you just have to jump right in and try stuff! :)

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