Background

Background... the boring stuff!

In 2007, I attended a hands-on session at EBCUE's Cool Tools on using Google Tools in the classroom.  It was presented by Chris Walsh, one of my favorite leaders in EdTech. I attended his presentation again while at the CUE conference later in the year, and was very excited about the possibilities. However, implementing this was a challenge.  I tried several things, but ran into "roadblocks". There were issues with student access, for example.

I did step forward with the after school GATE program, however, once I switched to teaching middle school.  I set up e-mail addresses for each of the participating students, and taught them a few basics. Then I got out of the way. The students were collaborating across the room, creating documents and slideshows, and I just got to watch it all happen. I was hooked. The students continued to work from home, sharing their projects with me and excitedly looking for feedback and extension ideas. I just couldn't seem to make it happen with my larger groups of students, which was disappointing. We did other types of collaboration, of course, using a wonderful program called Thinkquest. But it wasn't quite the same.

In 2010, I was excited to see another training offered, but even though I was willing to pay, I wasn't able to attend per my new administrator.  I was determined to attend in 2011, and I did, along with another colleague. This time, I was at Northern California CUE (if you're not familiar with CUE, you should get familiar!) and got to see some great presenters in action (Alice Keeler and Dave Childres are two who come to mind). Once they began talking about getting a school domain for Google Tools, I knew what needed to happen. I sent my principal an e-mail, and he forwarded it to my district administrators right then and there. The conversation began. My principal was fully on board and ready to support whatever my colleague and I wanted to implement, knowing that we would focus on student access and achievement as the ultimate goals of this project.

In the meantime, the high school my daughter attends implemented Google accounts, and each student was assigned an account. I was so jealous! Watching her log on from home to see  a video or worksheet her teacher had posted into their shared Google space was rewarding from a mom's point of view, and envy-making from my tech-teacher point of view! (Can you see the drool through your screen?) When meeting with County technology personnel, I was told that my child's district had implemented Google district-wide, and that the roll-out was very well thought out and implemented systematically.

Again, I started to pester people, referring them to the smaller district that had done a full implementation. I was simply asking for one site as a pilot!  They were cautious, as we would hope and expect. They wanted to make sure that we had the correct permissions in place, legal concerns addressed, etc. My Assistant Superintendent was on board, after meeting with our principal, but we still weren't communicating in all the right ways. Ultimately, I agreed that we wouldn't start with student accounts, and that my principal would continue to work with admin to get those permissions in place.  I would start with a core group of teachers to develop the backbone of what we wanted to do.

Last Thursday, I got to pick our domain name. Yippee!!! We now owned VVMS.org, which Joe at the district obtained for us. As of Friday, it was verified through Google, so we could begin setting up accounts. We are not yet verified as a school, so we don't have access to the education-based sites quite yet.  We are currently in something of a limbo-land, which may take a few days to work through.

I spent the weekend setting up my pilot group (principal, core teacher, science teacher, math teacher, and me) with accounts, and playing with e-mails. Joe, in charge of tech at the district, is also a part of this team. As I have tried to do different things, he's responded quickly by letting me know what idea I have works, and what doesn't.

The purpose of this blog is to journal this journey so that we can gather suggestions from others AND know later how to support others at the beginning of their journey too. We're going to make many mistakes, but we're going to have some fabulous, exciting successes.

Thoughts/questions at this moment:
How to open Blogger on the new domain
How to get the MX records thing working so that we can receive e-mail as well as send it
When will we be able to use the Google Apps for Ed, and not see all the business ads, etc.
What next? So many ideas... where to start!