There has been a huge interest in Google Classroom and from what we have seen so far it is going to be a revolutionary tool in further democratising EdTech and moving control to the individual teacher.
Our blog post on Google Classroom and the Google Classroom ‘Sneak Preview’ at our California Summit back in May sparked huge interest and many members of the AppsEvents team are preparing to spend time in the system in the early access phase over the summer. As people have seen from the previews online Google Classroom allows individual teachers to create an online classroom, and features extensive integration with Google Drive, so for example, teachers get one folder in Drive for each assignment which student coursework submissions get shared to.
In our conversations with schools and districts, there is a massive groundswell of interest in Google Classroom. Schools want to evaluate it quickly upon release so they can get up to speed and get teachers using it within their schools.
To help schools quickly ‘ramp up’ with Classroom we are delighted to be announcing the AppsEvents one-day ‘Google Classroom bootcamps’. Our initial courses are currently being scheduled for October and November to follow the planned release date of Classroom in September, and we will continue running them through 2015.
The day will be intensive and will leave attendees with both a high level view of best practices of using Classroom in their school, and with the detailed knowledge of how to setup and use classes. Topics include:
- Quick start – creating your first class and adding your students
- Power user tips and tricks
- Best practices for course creation and management, for example creating course templates and copying courses across terms and academic years
- Managing Classroom across the school
- Third-party Apps. How to integrate Classroom with more comprehensive Apps such as Course Director from WizKids and TeacherDashboard from Hapara
- ‘Train the trainer’ – how to train your colleagues on Classroom
As is the case with our fantastic ‘Google Educator Certification Bootcamps’ we will be running the boot camps both as one day ‘pre summit courses’ and as stand-alone courses. In addition, we will be rolling out Google Classroom content to our ‘Cloud Camp’ curriculum and of course Classroom sessions will be held at all our summits. Sessions will be led by many of our core team, including +Allison Mollica +Sarah Woods and +Lee Webster.
We have a Google form below to capture early interest so please complete this and it will help us in scheduling our course dates and locations. We will get back to you towards the end of the summer break with some preliminary schedules.
