Google Summit - Classroom Style!

Last week Monday and Tuesday, Mrs. Olson and I had the pleasure of traveling to Wisconsin Dells to the 2012 Midwest Google Summit.  The summit was a gathering of educators from all over the midwest, even one from India, who came together to grow professionally with Google Apps for Education.  While attending, we both had the opportunity to listen and learn from many fantastic educators on topics such as: Google Apps, Chrome extensions, sharing features (beyond typical Document sharing), using Sites for ePortfolios, and more!  The two days turned out to inspire the both of us to try something a bit different within our classroom.

On our road trip home, we planned and organized our first ever Classroom Google Summit.  We figured, two days of school (prior to Thanksgiving) and we still have some major Google "Things" that we wanted to get our students familiar with.  So, this morning, our summit began, with one student in particular very excited to get our "Geek Week" underway (to the left).

Our first order of business was discussing in detail our Gmail accounts.  We know our students enjoy using their email accounts, but to what extent we were unsure.  We would like them to use their accounts for communication purposes, as well as in an educational manner.  I found a great article from Education World which provided the "ABC's of Email Etiquette."  We discussed each of these.  Afterwards, each student received one of the letters, of which they then attempted to create a "Glogster" poster of their letter.  Later in the morning, students each selected another student in the class to email their letter and description to.  Their email had to include a descriptive subject, a salutation, a brief description/body, and a closing.  They then replied to their classmate who wrote to them.  Our simple email etiquette lesson went well.  Hopefully students will use some of the rules they learned.


After emailing, we took some time to set up personal blogs.  We used Blogger, which is one of Google's educational apps.  In setting up the blogs, we secured them from the outside world.  While students did not get any time to play with "design" features within Blogger, they did begin their first blog post.  They had to write a post describing similarities and differences between the City of Ember movie and book (which we recently finished).  Their post also had to include which they would prefer, if only one choice, the movie or book.  Not that surprised, because it is very good, many students opted for the book only.


So, our first day of our Classroom Google Summit has come to a close.  Tomorrow our agenda will include better Google search strategies (including finding images that can be used or modified), getting to know Drive, and using the research feature within Docs.  Should be fun!