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Do your teachers and staff have the tools necessary to work together as a team?  Considering building an intranet?  That’s what we’re doing and I’ll explain how.  The amount of power and functionality that a school has access to through a system such as Google Apps gives a great opportunity to build a collaborative workspace for teachers and staff with virtually no cost.  However the idea isn’t without it’s challenges.  When planning any sort of collaborative web effort, I recommend starting with three key questions:

1. What do you NEED to do?
2. What do you WANT to do?
3. HOW do you want to do it?

The first question is without a doubt the most important.  The second and third will change, even be discarded, if they don’t meet the requirements of the first one.  Our needs right now are simple:

1. A central location for forms and reference materials that can be accessed by any staff member on or off the network.
2. A shared location for policies and procedures (currently we use a network drive)
3. A simple way to keep said policies and procedures current for everyone needing access

Now this set of needs could be served by any number of solutions so we’re still at an impass.  On to question 2…what do we WANT?

1. A system that is easy to use
2. Integrated with our current email system
3. Available from anywhere
4. Reliable
5. Adaptable
6. Minimal (no) cost

Not much more specific, but it does point out some key requirements in narrowing the field.  For example, “integrated with our current email system” points towards Google Apps since it is what we have been using for email for two years very successfully.    Also, “available from everywhere” eliminates most network centric solutions and points us back to the cloud.

Finally we come to the HOW.  This can be a tough one since by this point you still have a couple of options left on the table and you need to do a critical analysis, cost-benefit comparison, etc.  For us this was made a great deal simpler by the last WANT…minimal (no) cost.  Looks like we’ll be building our intranet with Google Sites and Google Apps.

Next…functional requirements.

As the summer quickly slips by thoughts of lesson planning and lesson plans creep into the minds of teachers as the look towards the fall. Here are some thoughts and suggestions on how you can apply Google Docs to make your lesson plans easier to manage, maintain, and use during the coming school year.

Store them online

One of the obvious benefits from using Google Docs is the ability to store your lesson plans online. You can access them from home, school, or any computer with a browser and an internet connection. No longer are you limited to your own machine or your flash drive. Use them where and when you want to rather than when technology dictates you have to.

Write collaboratively

No teacher is an island to paraphrase the saying. You can leverage the collaboration functions in Google Docs to gather input from your colleagues on your lesson plans in a time and place convenient to them. More than just proof reading this is thought building on an educational scale.

Make them available online

Documents placed in Google Docs can be shared as read-only online resources through a simple URL. You can pass this along to substitutes, colleagues, even parents and students if the need should arise. If you update the document they are always working with the most current version, not that one that’s two months old and woefully out of date.

Revisions and revision histories

Lesson plans go through numerous revisions over time as they are kept relevant and fresh for our students.  Google Docs gives you revision histories so you can see what you have added or removed over time and see if everything old is new again or if that new section you added on a whim is really worth keeping after all.

Hyperlinking

Lesson plans no longer need to be the static printed document tucked away in a notebook that we reference as the year progresses.  Using linking from the plan you can connect to resources all over the Internet and make your plan grow beyon the basic to the engaging.  For example, if you’re  talking about Iran in a Social Studies program, why not connect to online news threads, Google Maps, and more to make the topic click for your students.

Creating an online lesson plan center

You can continue this idea even further and use Google Sites to create a class center for lesson plans, resources, images, and files all stored online and available at a moment’s notice.  Tie the pieces together in the platform and you’re all set.

Take the opportunty to use systems like Google Docs to make your lesson planning simpler and easier as well as bringing it to a new level of engagement and flexibility for the coming school year.

A couple of important facts for your next discussion around, “Why should we be teaching our students this stuff?”

Some 54% of enterprise-size organizations use Web 2.0 technologies, as do 74% of companies with fewer than 500 employees, according to a study Web 2.0 technology adoption and the future of social-media initiatives in enterprises.

Blogs are the most-used Web 2.0 technology (87% of respondents), followed by communities, wikis, RSS feeds and social networking.

The most successful are blogs (44% of respondents), communities (42%) and wikis (39%).

96% say all Web 2.0 technologies they’ve used have been successful; 83% reporting no clear failures.

The greatest obstacle to Web 2.0 deployment is limited internal resources.

Some 64% of those using Web 2.0 technologies rely on a combination of internal- and external-facing media/tools.

“The Awareness research found that…28% of organizations with over 500 employees have budgets greater than $50,000 for web 2.0 tools or social media. The top tools planned are blogs and wikis (56%) but many are also planning to deploy online communities,” writes FASTforward’s Bill Ives.

Is there any greater recommendation or reason for a topic to be included in the curriculum of a school than the ability of that curriculum to help students get a better place in tomorrow’s workforce? Isn’t that the argument used all the time? Well…let’s make sure we use our facts to reinforce the need to use these tools with our students…NOW!

Trends in Adopting Web 2.0 for the Enterprise in 2007

If you’re striving to push your classes into new realms of technology and are secretly lusting after the idea of a classroom full of ultra-mini PCs for your students, then I’ve got news for you!

To get the funding you need…you need to sell the children.

Not literally of course. You need to market them, their projects, their skills, and their learnings. As educators we spend a lot of time talking with our peers about the cool things we’ve done. We share the web links, show the vlog postings, comment on the blogs, all reveling in how far we’re coming.

Administrators need to be able to justify budgetary expenditures and it’s much easier when we can show what is accomplished for the money put out. How can you help us help you get the funding necessary to keep all the cool things happening?

A I D A

In marketing parlance, AIDA refers to Awareness Interest Desire Action. It is the buying path for most consumer goods and can be put to very effective use when the “product” you’re selling is the success of your students.

Awareness

Administrators live in the world of meetings, emails, discussions, and committees. For the most part they don’t and can’t have the time to be in the classroom. As such they’re not aware of what is possible and what is being accomplished in classrooms all over the world. Make them aware of what’s going on. Send them emails with links to successful sites. Show them videos of what is happening in other schools. Set meetings with them not to beg for money but to share with them your successes. You’re giving them the ammunition to go hunt down your funds, an appreciation for what is successful, and demonstrating that your requests are justified by more than an “I want this.”

Interest

Once they’re aware of what’s possible and what’s being done you need to foster their interest in it and get their buy in. Showing what other schools are accomplishing is a great way since no administrator wants to be behind the others in their peer group. It’s more psychodynamic than it is scholastic. Talk with them and find out what their drivers are and direct your message to them.

Desire

Helping to foster their desire for success for the students, the school, the teachers, and themselves motivates administration to do what’s necessary to meet the needs that have been identified. Take the interest you spurred earlier and fan the flames. Get them worked up about a topic or idea that carries you towards your goal and help them share your desire to accomplish it.

Action

When you get to the point of taking the actions necessary to achieve your goal, help your administration out again. Do some of the leg work. Show them actual examples of technology that will do what you need. Put together a plan that results in the accomplishments you have been getting them fired up about. Most administrators are most effective as decision makers, so put the work in so all they need to do is make the decisions.

Your classroom projects and successes often are based on the level of technology you have on hand. If you need more, you need to justify why. The next time you’re in a staff meeting and says “How will we get this?” you can answer, “We’ll sell the children!”