Educate With Google

Came home to find my 21 months old, trying to open YouTube video on one of the smart phone of his mother. It literally caught my eye and made me rethink the days the child will grow up for further education. The argument which stroke me was: by the time my child will be able to grab the words and rhymes in school, will it be the same as this day when he is trying to open YouTube in mobile device? Will the traditional system of education in school comply with the level of his curiosity to use digital media for education? I became worried and spellbound. These things brought my attention to drop few lines regarding the 21st century learning methods.

Regardless of vendors in internet based education ecosystem, I found it easy to move forward with the accessible teaching and learning methods with Google Apps For Education. For the last four years I have been into Google in Education training and deployment.

What is Google Apps for Education and how this system is being adopted by more than 30million educators and students worldwide?

Google Apps for Education is an cloud based educational ecosystem put forward by Google Inc,  which provides services and tools to equip students and teachers. Software as a service has been one of the key disruptors of technology in higher education. The ability to move applications and services into the cloud frees up IT staff to focus on infrastructure and classroom technology. In the case of Google Apps for Education, it also relieves some of the pressure on colleges’ budgets.

Available at no cost to students and faculty, Google Apps includes cloud email, storage, hosting, word processing and collaboration tools. Previously, colleges were forced to invest millions in these services and struggled to modernize outdated technology, not to mention maintain email servers and data centers.

Schools of developing countries like Malaysia and Philippines have already moved to Google for education and country-wide deployment. One third of the schools and colleges in United Kingdom have also followed the trend and moved to Google for education. Not to forget the countless educators in USA and beyond are practicing Google Apps for Education and growing in number.

The tools that Google has provided for Google Apps for Education includes:

Google Classroom: Virtual classroom to organize assignments, score and grade , collaborate and engage students for everyday task.

Gmail: Emailing service that can be handled with any digital device having Internet.

Google Drive: Unlimited storage in cloud, capability to save and share Documents, Spreadsheet, Presentation, Photos and Videos and lot more.

Google Calendar: Time management and schedules along with calendar dates, can be shared and announced to group of people and lot more.

Google Sites: Unlimited websites to school domain, students and teachers can exchange the information with their own built website(no programming or skills needed).

Youtube: sharing and collaborating videos with own channel and audio-visual teaching methods.

Google+ : Social media designed to collaborate parents and teachers OR students and teachers in a single community page.

Hangouts: Chat with friends, students, teachers in real time with capability to visually talk with more than 24 persons at a time.

As mentioned above, these tools are being successfully practiced everyday by Millions of Educators worldwide. The service and tools are not limited to the above list though; there are ocean of Applications and third party integration possible with Google Apps for Education system. Google Apps for Education has broadened its scope with its own online store, where we can easily find educating tools and services that fulfils our requirements.

How Google Apps in Education works and what are the Prerequisites:?

Google Apps for Education is such designed that, any schools or Colleges can register for free. Which will give opportunity to provide countless identity (email ID and similar) to explore all the services provided by Google for Education. Great, now how can we access the services and what are the software requirements? Well, as said earlier all the Google services including video conferencing works with computer browser (Chrome, Firefox, IExplorer, Safari). So we DON’t NEED Extra Software to get service of Google in Education. To add more to the accessibility, Google Apps for education can be easily accessed with mobile phones, tablets, laptops and desktop computers.

The only support we require to deploy Google Apps for Education is INTERNET. That’s it and that’s all.

How Google in Education is changing the way we educate?

In a traditional classroom, a teacher thinks he/she is bound to cover the syllabus to prepare student for exam. This model is leaving the gap of educating learners of 21

st century. Even to educate ourselves, we need to research and find more facts on related topics before entering the classroom. That points to the use of online resources and open source to find the right topic. Google itself is a giant search engine and has given an open service to find whatever we want and whenever we want.

It has become a common practice nowadays, that a teacher points a student to do more research with Google. Here we go, the solution itself is in the hand of educators and students do practice online education to broaden their knowledge. Regardless of grade level or age or class divide, students are already making themselves ready to mold for future education.

Every student is trying to update the level of use of digital media, whether they are at home, and school or cyber café. 21st century learning and power of digital blueprint is practiced each day by our students. Using social media to educate and share the assignment has become common practice for students. Google is just helping these trend with managed resources.

Google Apps for Education- for Nepalese educators:

More than 24% of Nepalese citizen have access to internet now(ref: Nepal telecom report 2013). The use of social media and usages of smart phone is increasing exponentially. This is the right time we start making and preparing our educators to move along the trending technology use in schools. It is indeed in front of us that many students are pursuing abroad studies and they are being capable for major change over even for foreign big companies. But, also a fact that preparing student to compete with rest of the world is still not exactly how we are equipped in education system. Here I want to emphasis on the use of technology on classroom and overall digital education transformation.

Google Apps for Education comes with free registration that any Nepalese College or School can adapt. We have the skill and human-resource to push it furthermore and make our own model of application viable for Nepalese students and educators. As mentioned above, Google Apps for Education doesnot require high end software or large scale investment to deploy within the college or school, its only matter of motivation that we should be actually worried for.

More than 50 Schools and Colleges have already adopted the emailing services through Google Apps for Education. But, the lacking point is we are not aware of the scope and benefit of going Google. In my experience and service for last 2 years in Nepal, I have been trying to reach out more and more schools to show how Google in education can change the way we learn. My experience shows that schools and Colleges in Nepal do have the capability and minimum requirement to roll out Google for Education, the only thing we need to keep in mind is that it’s the demand and requirement of students whom we are trying to educate, because they are the future pillars of this century.

The questions that hits me every time I go around counseling the educators are We don’t have electricity, we are busy with our exam and stuff so we do not have time for transformation of online education system, we cannot provide students with internet because we restrict internet use in schools … Ok soo few as of many.. let me put it this way: Electricity is National issue and everyone of us are being slaved to live under dark but, using the hand held devices and laptop computers, we still can work this out. In fact we can make our students more productive at the time of electricity outage, asking them to creatively use their digital device.

Coming to the question regarding ‘no time for transformation’ , lets us wake up for the world

which is waiting for us to make a change. Google in Education is an educational tool that is helping us to grow and flow with the trend in education system of the world. And we don’t want to be kept behind. It is indeed a part of educational tool, Google Apps for education is designed for education to make our(educators) life easy and accessible anytime/anywhere in need.

The last but not the least, ‘restriction’ of internet in schools is a big issue. But, if we look at it this way: Restrict the junk and not the education. Here you go, in today’s world we can make it possible to filter the unwanted junk within the school’s internet and provide students only with educational materials. Easy! Asking a student to report an assignment online but, restricting internet from school does not quite make sense.

Where to get started and how?

Google Apps for Education is a bundled tools service. It is always best to get the right counseling from the experts before migration. There are many Google certified trainers and deployment experts whom we can look for. Even, we can ask our educators to learn the online courses (free) and get the idea on Google Apps for Education and how to use them.

We have more than dozens of Google Groups and Google+ community to look forward to and learn how others are adopting the education services of Google. It is always better to do some research before making up mind.