A few weeks ago, I facilitated a session at the ECAWA Unconference entitled “Is Google taking over the world?” I know I’ve blogged about Google before, but there are a couple of reasons I want to mention them again. Someone asked if I have any commercial arrangement with Google. If only!!! No, I simply look at the things they do and ask how they might translate into an educational context. Google make it easy by being up front about their intentions and also by producing great stuff. A quick example – type an arithmetic sum into Google’s main search bar with only the arithmetic operators and no parenthesis. Something like 2+5*3-18/6. When you hit search, Google Calculator kicks in and not only solves the problem, it also adds the appropriate parenthesis. From a teaching perspective, we now have a little maths tool that even little kids can use to generate problems involving logical operators. As aside, try typing something along the lines of “2 tsp in ml” and see what Google makes of that.



The main reason I mention Google again is that, at the Unconference, Mike Leishman and I had a chat about whether schools would ever adopt a Google end to end solution like Google Apps for Education. Letting Google handle mail, file serving, document and spreadsheet handling, the whole lot. It made so much sense to me as it would take the burden of the school’s network infrastructure and add the flexibility of document collaboration, etc. (For a great example of how this works, have a read of Tom Barrett’s ICT in my Classroom Blog). The consensus was that we were probably still a fair way away from that.


Well, this week the NSW Department of Education announced it was dropping Microsoft Outlook/Exchange in favour of a Gmail solution for students. (Link here). At present it only applies to student mail, but makes me wonder what might be next.

DrJim

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