Google Apps for Education - Rating Our Transition - The Good

Image via CrunchBase

Well, it has been almost 4 full months since my school fully transitioned away from the Firstclass email system to the Google Apps for Education suite. In a series of posts over the next few weeks I'm going to share what we did well and what we wish we could do over. Today I'm going to start with what we did well during our transition (not to gloat, but we did do many things well, hence the ridiculously long post). As a side, I want to say that I'm incredibly impressed by how our users are making use of this network so far. We have some faculty and staff members piloting the use of ePortfolios with Google Sites and many other wonderful things going on as well. For seven years I worked at a school that used Microsoft Exchange and last year I used Firstclass at Castilleja. Without any hesitation, I can say that Google Apps smokes both of these platforms in terms of easy of use and collaboration potential (note how I didn't even mention anything about Google Apps being free and these other platforms costing a serious amount of money in terms of annual licensing, hardware, and IT staffing/management ;-)

Things we did well in our move to Google Apps for Education:

1. Youth helpers - We solicited the assistance of our students before, during, and after our June 15th, 2009 cut date and they were a tremendous help. In April we asked interested high school students to serve as "early adopters" of the new system. A handful agreed to transition to the system early and their participation was key. Some of these students even configured their mobile devices to access mail which they really appreciated. These early adopters gave us feedback and helped us tune and further customize our support materials that would be critical during the larger roll out.

We also had one of our student summer tech department interns create a series of screencasts to help support students throughout the transition. Ultimately these screencasts turned out to be more helpful to our faculty and staff members. Screencasts in general have been of immense value in getting the word out and providing support materials to our users.

2. Faculty and Staff Early Adopters - In addition to asking students to be early adopters, we also asked our faculty and staff to join in as early adopters last April and May. Once again, having these early adopters in the new space and providing feedback to us turned out to be immensely valuable on many different levels. We created weekly "Early Adopter Newsletters" for the 20 or so early adopters. This newsletter series helped keep people updated on our progress with the overall transition.

3. Transition Support Site - We created a transition support site that served as a repository for our support docs, tutorials, screencasts, etc. I'm not sure how many people used this site, but to this day is has served as a nice little portfolio of our transition. I'm glad we "ate our own dogfood" and used a Google Site to manage and organize these support members. Dave Girouard, who manages Google's Enterprise business worldwide, actually commented on our transition site in this Twitter post.

4. Faculty and Staff Transition Support Team - We created a support team of roughly 8 faculty and staff members who helped in many ways with our transition. In addition to creating support tutorials and attending a few meetings to help prepare the community for the move, they also contributed to a series of workshops we offered for our school community in late August. I greatly appreciate the hard work and contributions of all who participated on this team.

5. Workshops - Speaking of workshops, these turned out to be incredibly helpful for many of our staff and faculty members. We offered one on June 16th and three in late August. We basically went through each component of the network (mail, sites, calendar, doc sharing) in these workshops. They were each about 2 hours in length and participants were quite appreciative of these learning opportunities.

6. Faculty and Staff Dashboard Start Page - Thanks to the outstanding work of our Director of Technology, Steve Taffee, we have an awesome faculty and staff start page/dashboard. Google Apps networks certainly can be a bit messy when you first start out, and having folks set something like this as their home page can really simply information access for your folks. Here is a screenshot of what ours looks like (this dashboard was created with google sites and is permissioned to be visible only by users who have authenticated to the network). We created a dashboard start page for students too, but so far most of them don't really use it.

7. Activating most/all of the services - We activated pretty much all of the services for our student, staff and faculty users. This includes mail, sites, docs, contacts and contact sharing, mobile/cell phone access, calendar, and chat. We enabled other services including a custom URL generator (kinda like tinyurl) and Google's Moderator platform as well, but for some reason we can't configure our DNS internally to get these tools to work inside of the school's LAN. We also checked an option in the control panel that allows new labs and features to be available to users in our network. This gives our faculty, staff and students access to an ever evolving, powerful set of applications that allow them to collaborate, share and communicate in ways we couldn't have imagined even a few years ago. Our users love the gmail themes and labs. It is my belief that if you make powerful tools available to people and expect that they will do creative and powerful things, they will rise to the occasion (alternately, if you lock things down because you're afraid users might do something bad, they will engage you in an unending cat and mouse game that you cannot win). I'm glad to be at a school where we have liberal user policies that demonstrate trust and faith in our community members.

8. Custom login page - This was created by the handy work of our system engineer, Adam Contois (no, you can't hire him--in addition to his excellent work with python and the custom apps he has built for our google network, he is needed to push mobile lab carts around our campus ;-) You may view our login page here. Along with providing a school branded login point to these services, Adam also configured this application to allow administrators to sign in as other users (I believe this was all managed and configured with the Google OAUTH API). Being able to sign in as other users to help support is absoultely INVALUABLE. We did have Adam join us on the Edtech Brainstorm at Edtechtalk.com in June of 2009 to talk a little bit about some of the cool customizations he built for our network. Listen to the recorded audio from this conversation online here. Adam likes a good challenge and his work with our Google network and the other academic learning systems that we have in place (Linux lab, Moodle, Open Source client software deployment, etc) is greatly appreciated!

9. Research and development - We worked extremely hard on R and D with this network all of last year. Last year we activated the docs sharing component of the network and the students and teachers who used this really liked it (especially for things like collaborative scripts for movies, podcasts, etc). A year of using the network for document collaboration only really helped us learn the ins and outs of the system. We also spent time researching integration with Moodle and building our custom login page and experiementing with OAUTH. We dabbled with LDAP user directory integration, but at the end of the day we deciced not to enable this as our LDAP system wasn't in the best shape. Speaking of Moodle and Google, we were pretty psyched about the possibility for using this, but at the end of the day we decided not to go this route because we didn't want our non-teaching staff members to access their mail by going through Moodle. We also didn't want a scenario where access to  mail became dependent on our Moodle network...we figured that Google's uptime would be better than our own Moodle network. But we still do think it is pretty cool that users could authenticate into moodle and then easily access the Google network from the google apps block in Moodle.

10. Development of a "pilot google apps network." In order to do much of the aforementioned R&D, we setup a "pilot" Google Apps network (the domain was "pilot.castilleja.org.") This allowed us a sandbox space to test, evaluate, play, explore, destroy, and discover new things. Google allows you to do this free of charge and I recommend to any organization who might be transitioning to Google to deploy a pilot network.

11. Networking and sharing - We spoke with people all over the place via telephone, social networks, etc. We linked up with several other independent schools who were thinking about transitioning away from Firstclass to Google Apps and we shared ideas in an online forum. We even hosted a webcast at one point to discuss strategies. We spoke with the lead IT manager at UW-Madison's Alumni network. UW-Madison had just shifted their mail services away from some proprietary application to Gmail and his advice and sharing of experiences was very helpful (I can't find his name, but when I do I will update this post).

12. Conference calls with our transition support reps from Google Education, Cindy and Austin, were extremely helpful as well. Google gives away transition support for free...this basically means that they dedicate a representative who is available via email, phone, google voice, etc up until you flip the switch and actually transition. They were extremely helpful in providing us with documents and suggestions to help ensure a smooth transition. We had basic questions regarding data ownership, reliability, data mining, advertising, security, etc-before we got too far along in the process we had answers to these questions-it is important that you do the same because people in your organization who are skeptical about outsourcing email will ask these questions and may event try to to spread FUD (Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt). We aggregated much of the documentation and answers to our questions from google early in this process over at this wiki.

13. Installation of a Moodle virtual learning network to work in tandem with Google Apps. We installed Moodle at the beginning of the 2008-2009 network for faculty members who want a true virtual instructional environment that allows for assignment submission and grading. I mentioned above that we decided against the full google-moodle integration, but even having Moodle available for our teachers to use has been great.

14. Enabling of Postini Spam Services - Right now google is giving away Postini spam services free of charge. When we switched to Gmail we did see a fair amount of spam slipping through Google's basic spam service. After enabling Postini, this ended. 

15. Student user name method -We used the last two digits of student graduation years + first initial + last name for student user names in the network. This means that Sara Smith from the class of 2020 would have a username of 20ssmith. This has made it really easy for administration, searching for students in the network, building contact lists, handling conflicts with users having the same name, etc.

16. Enabling mobile access for all users - I mentioned that we enabled almost all possible services above, but mobile services have been great thus far. Many of our users, including students, are configuring their various mobile devices to access their information in the network.


17. Transparency - We were transparent from the very beginning when we were floating the idea about possibly switching from Firstclass. We talked about this at committee meetings, with student groups, and we gave separate presentations at our all-faculty and all-staff meetings last spring. Our Transition Support site was, from the first day, made available on the open web and wasn't closed in any way. Throughout the process we solicited suggestions and feedback. By the time the final decision was made by our administrative leadership team, we had the support of the overwhelming majority of our school community. We even recorded our proposal presentation to our faculty and posted it for those who couldn't be in attendance. I feel as though by being direct and transparent we were able to build some positive mojo for this move.
 

ePortfolio Talk with Grade 9 Learners

Last week I wrote a quick post about the inroads we are making at my school in terms of ePortfolio learning (truthfully, the progress is very limited, but hey, it is a start). Prior to having the students begin the process of building up their portfolios I had a little conversation with them about about the basics of portfolio learning. I recorded and posted a variation of this talk and I embedded it below.

Danah Boyd on "Teens and Social Networks"

Dr. Danah Boyd, who is an expert in the area of youth and online social networking spaces, spoke yesterday with Steve Hargadon from Classroom 2.0/Future of Education. The MP3 audio recording is included below and I highly recommend you take the time to listen to it.

Dr. Boyd's dissertation "Taken Out of Context: American Teen Sociality in Networked Publics" focused on how American youth use networked publics for sociable purposes. It is important that all teachers, parents and administrators have the right information about what people (youth and adults alike) are doing with networked spaces.

As a related note, here is a link to my policy regarding forming connections with people (youth and adults alike) in online spaces. I wrote this as a way to provide some transparency about my online connections.

Audio Recording from Danah Boyd's Talk with Steve Hargadon:
http://audio.edtechlive.com/conversations/danahboyd.mp3

Portfolio Learning...its Happening!

Image by swisscan via Flickr

I'm so pleased to report out that we are making some progress with portfolio learning at my school here in Palo Alto, California. Today I worked with some of the 9th grade students to introduce them to the concept of portfolio learning-see the google slide deck below. This slide deck was used to guide the conversation with the students today (I will make a recording of this and post the audio along with my slides in a future blog post here).

We know that the stories of our unique learning journeys cannot be boiled down to a letter grade. It is impossible to reduce our passion, interests and achievement to a set of numbers, symbols and letters. Back in my pre-service days at the University of Wisconsin - Madison we explored the potential of portfolios as a way to capture authentic student learning and achievement-but that was pre-internet and we only had analogue systems to track and manage the learner portfolios. We now have simple, easy to use systems in place for everyone to keep her own eportfolio that may be used across subjects, extra-curricular experiences, and academic years. Eportfolios have the potential for a learner to effectively tell her learning story and to make meaning of her learning in a way that works best for her.

I think this is going to turn into something really cool here at our school-I can't wait!



For more information on portfolios, visit Dr. Helen Barrett's site (she is the Queen Bee of portfolio learning).

Our First Student Mathcast!

I'm excited about the potential of students creating simple, short videos where they explain and teach concepts that they are exploring. I've always believed that the best way to learn something is to teach it and that we should use instructional design that puts students in the role of the teacher as much as possible. This is our very first screencast created by our sixth grade students and we think it will provide a nice launching base for other mathcasts in the future. This video is posted over YouTube and it is also posted at the class wiki, which is currently is only visible to the sixth grade students. A few students have already commented on the video-this is where things will get interesting as the students engage in collaborative knowledge building to help with their understanding.

A special thank you is in order to Eric Marcos and his sixth grade mathcasters at MathTrain.TV for their pioneering work in this area. We shared some of Mr. Macos' student mathcasts with our students to help inspire their thinking.

On the tech side, the three students authored their slides in the google docs presentation tool and we recorded and edited their 'cast using Screenflow.

Yammer - an experiment in organizational micro-blogging

Image via CrunchBase

I've heard quite a bit about Yammer over the past few months and truthfully, I didn't think a walled garden space for micro-blogging made sense. After all, isn't the potential upside of sharing in a open spaces like Twitter so much greater due to a much larger audience and network? After reading a Techcrunch post a few weeks back I decided to give Yammer a shot and I have to say that I'm glad I did. While we don't have and overwhelming amount of traffic and users from our school in the space, it certainly does have the potential to be a wonderful way to share links, resources, classroom doings, questions for discussion, etc.

What is Yammer and why might it be useful?
Yammer is essentially a private mircoblogging platform for organizations. Posts are not limited to 140 characters like in Twitter and may include text, images, links, etc. Yammer offers a decent desktop client and the iPhone App is pretty decent (soon the iPhone app will include photo sharing from the iPhone camera, which will make a great on-the-fly classroom sharing tool). Groups inside of the network may be created and Yammer supports threaded conversation, which is something that Twitter does not offer. In comparison to email, I believe it has the potential to be a much more effective space to share information across traditional organizational boundaries. For years I've found email to be too linear and one dimensional and I think many folks share my thinking. In email I've found that many folks typically do not share with the entire organization, but instead only with their department or mail group. As we consider multi-disciplinary learning opportunities in our schools, we're going to have to look at using communication systems that move us away from 'island' communication. After all, there is a very good chance that the math link or teaching idea that a math teachers shares with other members of her department department could have relevance to a much broader audience that even includes students.

My experience in setting up the network for our organization:
The first step involved my going over to Yammer and creating my account. I had to so with my Castilleja email address as the registration system is dependent upon email verification. Once I verified that I indeed owned that email address, I was in the network and Yammering. After getting into the space I invited a few of my colleagues in the tech department and a couple of faculty members. Initially traffic was pretty light, but eventually  invited some other colleauges who invited others, etc. After about a week or so I posted a notice to our faculty & staff distribution list and I eventually sent an invitation to a few students who work on our radio show project and also to my advisees.

Our Progress in Yammer:
We currently have nearly 30 faculty, staff and students in the network and my guess is that we average around 5 posts a day. This isn't very many posts, but in comparison to the kinds of email posts we see going to our faculty & staff distribution list, it has potential to be an excellent platform to discuss teaching and learning. The vast majority of emails to our faculty/staff distribution lists are operational in nature while the 5-10 daily posts at Yammer have some relevance to learning. I'm not convinced entirely that Yammer will work for us, but it certainly should be an interesting experiment.

If cross departmental, multi-constituent (eg-teachers, students, staff, administration), and open sharing regarding teaching and learning isn't happening in your school's email system, then where is it happening??

I'm including a few of our recent Yammer posts so you have an idea of what some of our folks are sharing (I won't reveal the identities of those posting)...while these posts aren't earth shattering, I'm convinced that this type of sharing is really important. After all, the ideas of an organization's employees are quite possibly its most valuable asset.

"the library has obtained a KINDLE for the casti community to experiment with. loading new content. any requests?"


"Kristin sent me a link to a great blog, Letters of Note http://www.lettersofnote.com/ which posts interesting and historical letters (with transcripts)."


From "Red Scarf Girl" to WorldBook Online, check out English 6 students engaged in a lesson: http://library.castilleja.org


"Just watched the ISS and Discovery pass overhead, and so can you! Palo Alto viewing times for the next few days can be found here: http://tinyurl.com/ny83me   On Tuesday and Wednesday the space shuttle Discovery will appear a few minutes ahead of the ISS, along the same path. Lower magnitudes are brighter, so Tuesday evening's pass should be quite bright, even though the sky won't be fully dark yet."


"i am trying to cultivate a habit of searching youtube for interviews with Latin American authors and other juicy tidbits for my classes."

"I just watched Dan Pink talk on TED. Great recommendation Matt. Great talk and quite appropriate for our mindsets discussion. TED never fail to amaze me. Make sure to check it out at TED.Com"

Did You Know 4.0

The original "Did You Know" video created by Karl Fisch and Scott McCloud was recently re-published as version 4.0 and is embedded below. This is bound to be an excellent conversation starter regarding the need to re-think the traditional model of school given the information abundant environment that we are now immersed in.

Pop over to Scott's blog, Dangerously Irrelevant, to read comments and engage in the conversation.

Parent Education Opportunity: Wednesday, September 9th at 5:00 pm Pacific

This live Internet broadcast on Wednesday, September 9th, 2009 looks like an excellent educational opportunity for parents, teachers and administrators. Jane Nelsen will be speaking on the topic of parenting in an age of the Internet and social networking. Participating in this event is super easy and only requires a computer connected to the Internet. Please spread the word and pass this link out to as many people as possible.

For more information on this event and for details on how to participate live, click here to visit the event info page at Conversations.net.

Our "New" Linux Lab

I'm proud to work in a school tech department that is so focused on environmentally responsible computer practices and policies (I might also add that our department is one of the "greenest" in the school, with 3 of the 4 department members commuting by bike each day to work). This is in large part due to the vision and leadership of our school's Tech Director, Steve Taffee. We're certainly not perfect in all areas as a department and there is room for improvement, but in many respects I think our school is at the forefront of the "Green Computing" movement. This is especially evident with our "New" Linux lab that Steve and Adam Contois (Help Desk/Sys Engineer) deployed this past summer. I write "New" in quotations because the lab itself is new, but the computers in the lab are actually circa 2002 IBM desktop computers with old LCD displays and reused keyboards and mice. These old IBM computers were replaced last year in our language learning lab by new HP desktops. When we made the decision last spring to relocate our 17" iMac computers from our iMac lab to a newly created "Digital Arts Studio" in our fine arts center, instead of purchasing brand new replacement computers we decided to re-use the old IBMs to fill the void (I might also add that this move saved our school a significant sum of $$$). The computers feature a pretty standard installation of Ubuntu Linux, which includes Open Office and a folder of games. I'm amazed at boot times, application loading speed, and the all around solid performance of computers that TCO models are telling us to put out to pasture.

Initial student reaction to the computers in this space is typically, "These are ugly." But when they consider the environmental impact and when they actually use the computers, the students really seem to appreciate and enjoy this resource. Quite honestly, after 10 minutes of web browsing and working in our new web-based email system (Google Apps), the students seem to completely forget that they are using a different operating system. We had a full class of 17 students in the lab for the first time this past week and the performance was quite solid, especially considering each student was authoring in Google Docs, a web based word processing environment.

On Tuesday of this past week we had our first "Linux Lab Open House." We invited students, teachers, staff and administrators to come take a look at the Linux desktop operating system in action. We only had a few people attend, but it proved to be a very nice introduction to Linux as an operating system. See the video clip below from Tuesday's open house. We're hoping to have a second open house at some point in October and we're going to try to invite parents as well. We're even considering doing a "Make-it-take-it" type of day where students/families can bring in their old computers and we'll help them load Ubuntu Linux.

MadV is back on YouTube with One World-HD!

I posted about MadV's original "One World" project as part of a larger stream of thinking on the topic of the Internet as a platform for peace, better cultural understanding, etc. I was visiting YouTube today when I noticed that MadV is remixing is "One World" project 2 years later, but this time in high definition. I'm eager to participate and I'm hopeful that some other members of our school community will consider doing so as well. How about you??