 Hello everyone and welcome to Connected Learning through Google Apps. My name is Jennifer Bloomingdale. Currently, I'm an e-course facilitator at Powerful Learning Practice. I'm a Google educator and all of my e-course is focused on the integration of web 2.0 tools. For this presentation, we'll look at some specific features of Google Apps for Education and how they can support connected learning. To get started, what is connected learning? Here's an infographic from the Connected Learning Research Network and Digital Media and Learning Research Hub that shares the key features of connected learning. You'll find a URL to this image in the resource document of our presentation. We start with production-centered. Students are actively producing, creating, experimenting and designing. Then peer culture. There are socially meaningful interactions based around students, learning and ideas. Interests. There's room for students' interests and passions in connected learning. Openly networked. Learning is connected with people and places outside of the school walls. The shared purpose. Web 2.0 tools and social media allow people with shared goals to work together no matter where they are located. And lastly, academic. Allowing students to see their potential when outside academic institutions connect to their work. So, what is Google Apps for Education? According to Google, it is free web-based email, calendar and documents for collaborative study anytime, anywhere. To me, this means it allows students and teachers to efficiently work together in a safe connected environment. So, why Google Apps? What makes this different than other productivity tools that we're all used to? When I was first asked to use Google Docs, I wanted nothing to do with it. I was comfortable using Microsoft Word and so had no reason to switch. But when my students all got notebooks and we really began using our Google accounts, I realized that the ease of sharing and collaborating is what made the difference. The first aspect of connected learning that Google Apps can support is the fact that it can be openly networked, but at the same time you can control how open you want your students' documents to be. This provides a safe and controlled environment for younger students to learn etiquette and internet safety. So, how can we adjust those share settings to allow either the public to view students' work or to allow students to collaborate on documents together? Once you've created a document presentation or spreadsheet, you'll notice a blue button up in the top right hand corner. If you hover over that, it will tell you how the document is shared. So currently this one is shared private only to me, so it's not shared with anybody else. If I click on that, you'll see another box pops up that gives me some options for sharing. You can share with specific people. So if I enter an email address in, I can say if I want that person to edit, comment, or only view, I can add a note, and then I can send it. Okay, so you'll see now it's shared with one person. Okay, and then you can adjust if you want to share with more people by clicking on that button again. You'll notice you can get a shareable link. So it says copy the link and turn link sharing on. So if I do that, this now means that anyone with the link can view this document, or again, I can adjust it. They can either comment or edit. You can also turn the link off if you want. But this helps if you just want to either copy and paste that into an email or message that to somebody. So that allows them to view the link. One thing with viewing link is people don't necessarily need to be signed into their gmail account to see your document. So that's something to keep in mind. And also if you're working with young students, links can be passed around. So you might not have full control over who's accessing their documents. If maybe a parent passed a link to a grandparent, you have others viewing your document. If you come to advanced, you'll see that brings you to more options for sharing. And if you want a document to be public, this is where you'll go where it says anyone who has the link can view. I'll click on that to change. And you'll see you can have public on the web, which means anyone on the internet can find it in access, which means there is a chance it would show up on search engines. So that's something to keep in mind. If you're using this within a Google apps for education account, you might have some more options in this window as well, where you can either specifically share with people in your domain. So that might be within your school district or within your school. So you have that extra level of security where if you want to share out, but not necessarily publicly, you can share within your school environment as well. So these are the sharing options of Google apps that allow Google apps to support the openly networked aspect of connected learning. The next aspect of connected learning that we'll look at is peer culture. Through the use of those sharing options, students and teachers can highlight and leave comments for each other and pertain to specific areas of documents. Multiple users can edit a document at the same time. And there's a template gallery available to all users. You can add your own or search for ones already completed that might help you save time. Two ways that Google apps can support the peer culture is that multiple users can be on a document editing at the same time. And if they aren't on the document at the same time, they can also leave comments off to the side highlighting specific areas of the text. So you'll notice there's a pink cursor on my screen. And if you look up here in the top right hand corner, you'll see there's a J. So this document was shared with another one of my accounts. And I am now viewing this document in both accounts so you can see when someone is on and if they're not signed in, it'll say anonymous something. It's usually an animal. If they have a picture associated with their Google account, their picture will show up there so you can see who's on the document. And the different colored cursors allows you to see where the person is within the document and what part they might be editing. If you want to leave comments, you can come up to the commenting section and you can either comment from here. So you'll see it highlighted where my cursor was. Okay, or I can highlight a specific area of text and come up to the comment icon. Okay, and you'll see it's now highlighted my text and I have a box where I can add another comment. And then if you come and click on your comment, you'll notice there's a spot for someone to reply. So you can have asynchronous discussions about the document. If once whatever you're talking about is resolved and taken care of within the document, you can click resolve. And you'll notice that the comment disappeared, but it still keeps a record of it. If you come up into comments, you'll be able to see what the discussion was. Another option when collaborating with users on a document is the chat feature. So if you have people signed in, you'll notice this icon right here. It looks like a chat bubble. If I click on that, it will open up the chat. So you'll see I have my two accounts signed in so you can have a live chat with whoever's on the document at that time. The key here, though, is that anybody who wants to use chat must be signed into their gmail account. So if they're coming up as an anonymous user, they're not going to be able to open up the chat. So those are options within a doc, which also works in Google Slides and Google Sheets as well that allow users to have a peer culture of working together, collaborating and supporting one another. The template gallery is another feature of Google Apps that can support the peer culture in connected learning. To access the template gallery, come up to new, scroll down to more, select from template. So I view the template gallery as a digital photocopying machine. You can put templates in here that you want your students to access or you can browse templates created by other users that could hopefully save you some time. So if I want to look for some education related ones, I'll come down to the students and teachers category. And you'll see you'll find a syllabus, a presentation. So what this does is if you decide to use a template, it brings a copy of this into your Google Drive. So if I click use this template, you'll notice I now have the index card background. And since it says copy, that lets you know that it's your own copy. It's not shared with anybody else and you can edit as you need to. This works for student work as well. If you have a specific outline that you want them to follow, you can put it into the template gallery and send them there to download or bring in a copy into their own Google Drive. So take some time and explore. There's definitely a lot of options out there and you can easily personalize. So even if it's not exactly what you need, you can adjust it to meet your needs. So it can definitely save you some time. The last aspect of connected learning that we will look at is production centered. With all of the tools available within Google Apps, there are many options for students as they think about sharing their knowledge. While we're only going to touch on a few examples today, the possibilities are endless when it comes to creating within Google Apps. Google Slides can be used in a variety of ways to create products. You can easily add images, videos, and hyperlink, which allows students to create presentations, tutorials, or digital posters. This next section of video will show you some steps I use when creating a tutorial using Google Slides. The first thing I do when creating my tutorial is develop a table of contents and a rough outline for my tutorial. So you notice I have some blank slides, but I have the titles typed into the title section, which I highly recommend as it makes it easier to link between the slides. So I'll come back to my table of contents, highlight the text that I want to link, come up to the insert link icon, slides in this presentation, and scroll down and find the slide I want to link it to. Click a pie. Now when I click on that, you'll see I get a link and it brings me right to that slide. Other features that lend themselves to creating tutorials are the fact that you can insert images and objects. So you'll see on the slide I have inserted a screenshot of the insert menu. I have then used the arrows and you can get to them by this menu up here, the menu bar, or insert line, and then I've also added text boxes. So you can insert shapes, text boxes, arrows, and images to allow you to easily point out specific information you want your users to see. Another feature that lends itself to creating tutorials is the fact that you can easily insert videos from YouTube. To do that, come up to insert video, and then you can either search YouTube or insert a URL of a specific video. The last thing I do for my tutorials is add navigation buttons that allows the users to easily navigate back to the table of contents when they're done viewing a slide. To do this, I create a text box, then I highlight the text, come up to link, and choose my table of contents, click apply, and now that button will bring me back to the table of contents. Those were the basic features I used to create tutorials using Google Slides. Many of those features shared to create a tutorial can also be used to create digital posters within Google Slides. The key difference is adjusting the size of the slide. So if you come to file, and scroll down to page setup, you'll see it's custom. So when you first come in, it would probably be set to widescreen. So all you need to do is click this little down arrow, come to custom, and you can do it by 11 if you want the size of a piece of paper, click okay, and you can then create a poster. If you want to publish these online and publish them as a webpage, you can go to file, publish to the web, click publish, okay, and you can either choose an embed code to embed this into a wiki or blog or a class webpage or you can link it. So if I copy this link and paste it in, this is what I will find. So students can create the posters and share the links with other users and then they can use the hyperlinks or watch the videos within the digital poster. So it looks professional and it gives students another option for creating within Google Slides. Lastly, we'll look at Google Drawings. Google Drawings allows users to create graphics that can easily be integrated into other Google tools or use on their own as digital posters. A key difference between this and what I just shared about Google Slides is that you cannot add a movie to Google Draw. Like Google Slides, Google Drawings has many options for graphic design. You can add images, text boxes, shapes, arrows. You can also insert a table, you can publish this to the web as well. So if I go to file, publish to web, you'll see you can choose your image size. So I'll publish that. You can also embed it in a blog wiki or webpage. You can adjust the size of it by going to file, page setup, and adjust your size again. There you go. You have the option for custom sizing as well. So that's a brief overview of some of the options students can use when using Google Drawings to create graphics. One last thing that I want to mention is that with all of the features I shared of Google Slides and drawings, you're still able to share and collaborate on those documents. So not only are these tools supporting the production-centered aspect of connected learning, but the peer culture as well. There are endless possibilities when it comes to using Google Apps for Education to support connected learning. I hope this presentation is inspiration as you begin to think of your own ways to use it. You can find resources for a presentation at the link provided and please feel free to contact me if you have any questions. I'm always glad to help.