 Good morning and welcome to this week's edition of Encompass Live. I am your host, Krista Burns here at the Nebraska Library Commission. Encompass Live is the Commission's weekly online event. Yes, we are a webinar. I save this every week. You can call us there. We won't be offended by it. We embrace our webinar-ness. Sure. I made up another word. We cover anything that may be of interest to librarians. The show is free and open to anyone to watch. We do the live show here Wednesday mornings at 10 a.m. Central Time. But if you are unable to join us on Wednesdays, that's fine. All of our shows are recorded and posted onto our websites. And so you can go there and watch all the previous shows. And we do a mixture of things here, presentations, book reviews, mini-training sessions, interviews. Basically anything that may be of interest to librarians. As I said, we want to have it on the show and share it with you. We have Nebraska Library Commission staff that sometimes do presentations for us and we sometimes bring in guest speakers. And this week we have a combination of that. We have our regular monthly tech talk. Tech talk with Michael Sowers. Michael Sowers is the Technology Innovation Librarian here at the Nebraska Library Commission. Good morning. He's here next to me. And once a month we bring him on to talk about a more techy-focused topic and share tech news of the week, of the month, sorry. So sometimes, and generally you hang almost every single time you bring in a guest speaker. Generally, yeah. So it's a once a month tech guest thing. Yep. So I will just hand over to you, Michael. All right. We have with us today. Great. Thanks, Krista. Give a little bit of background to how I found this presentation. I subscribe to a lot of blogs. I mean a lot. And notice I said subscribe, not read a lot of blogs. I skim a lot of blogs. I read a lot of headlines. If something catches my eye, I will read a little deeper. And in the middle of April, so about six weeks ago, one of the blog posts that came across my screen was called a Game Changer GAFE. And the GAFE didn't really sound too familiar to me, right off the top. But the first sentence was, recently I introduced Google Apps for Education to my fourth grade students. I immediately brought up the whole blog post, jumped down to the bottom to where I could leave a comment and said, hey, please, I want you on the show. Because we've had presentations on Google Apps previously. I believe Desmond up in Idaho has used Google Apps for her public library staff. But this is the first person I'd run across that was using it with kids, specifically fourth graders. That was on the Tangled Librarian blog run by Cynthia Stogbill. Cynthia, you're on the line with us? I am. Yeah. She's at the Belfield Milliken Park Elementary School Library in Fremont, Nebraska. So she's a local here for us. And she got back to me really quick and she said, I love to talk about it. So Cynthia, I'm just going to hand it on over to you and let you tell us what you did. Okay. All right. Well, the title of kind of my presentation today is Adventures in Google Apps for Education. Because I can tell you that it was definitely an adventure. And just a little bit about myself. I am a school librarian. I spent some time as a K-12 school librarian at Lakeview Community Schools. I am currently at Fremont Public Schools. This year I was at two elementaries, K-4 buildings. And next year I'm moving to Johnson Crossing in middle school. So I'm going to move up to 5678 next year. And I am a Nebraska EdChat co-founder on Twitter. Common Sense Media Educator, which is a wonderful resource for digital citizenship. And it is all free. So I love that. I am a Total Tech nerd. And you can pretty much ask anybody that knows me. And then, like Michael said, my blog is Tangled Librarian.blogspot.com. And kind of a background on the blog. I started that blog when I became a school librarian. Partly because I wanted to just remember my journey and sometimes look back and see how things had changed and maybe how much I had grown or just kind of celebrate my victories and remember what kinds of things were happening and when they were happening and just to give me some perspective. And also just, you know, if anybody else had ever picked up on it, they would just hopefully see that maybe they weren't the only ones dealing with some of the issues that I felt like I had found myself in. So it's been a really fun resource for me to go back and look and kind of watch my journey as I've progressed through my profession. So Adventures in Google Apps for Education. I will just tell you that Google Apps for Education, if you are a Google school, it is a power pack of resources to get things done. It is kind of a one-stop shop. You can use all of those pieces, all of those components to help kids to communicate, to collaborate and really teach them how to constructively manage all of their stuff, their documents, their email, to do research, all kinds of things. And it is just such a great resource. And one of the things that I love about it is that it is web-based. So, you know, they can work on stuff at home. And if you have anywhere you can get internet access, they can get to their documents. They can get to their stuff. And that's really kind of a cool concept, because if they're working on something and they don't have a jump driver, it didn't save right at school and it's not right on the jump drive and they take it home and they don't have the same resource or version of Word at home and they open it up and they get garbled, garbleness and it's due tomorrow. Google Apps kind of eliminates that because it is web-based and so wherever they can log on to the internet, they can log into their Google account and they can get to their resources and they can do their work wherever they need to do it. And that's kind of a cool principle for kids who are super busy and maybe go from home to home or, you know, or just, you know, whatever. It is just such a great, just a super resource for them. So they can do their email, their stocks and drive, they can do Google Earth and I am going to talk just briefly about Google Classroom at the end. I'm super excited about that and I'll share just a little bit with you before we're done. So one of the big things about Google Apps for Education is it is a great foundation in teaching kids about their digital footprint. You are able to really guide them and model what a good digital citizen is because you're teaching them email, you're teaching them how to communicate, how to collaborate. If you're collaborating on a document, no, you don't go in and delete somebody's stuff just to be funny. And on a document, actually, you know, I tell the kids, there's a revision history. If you go in and you delete something, number one, we can see when you did it. And number two, if you accidentally really just muck up the whole thing, we can go back to a previous version and we can pull that back and we can kind of get us back to a starting point and it's going to be okay. So we really are able to model how to collaborate in a constructive way. To give kids feedback in kind of a 24-7 environment and it really is a real-world platform. It is what they will probably use for the most part when they leave school. They will probably use it at post-secondary. They may use it in the workplace. So it's very applicable to just life in general. And so it is a great foundation for teaching them how to get things done and how to be a good digital citizen. So my journey with Google Apps kind of started at Lakeview. I introduced Google Apps to the 712 students and it was in conjunction with noodle tools which a lot of the ESUs in Nebraska do provide and it is a wonderful tool for research and for pulling together citations and notes and creating outlines and it coordinates very nicely with Google. Kids can kind of start their project and noodle tools, take their notes, get their citations and they can dump the whole thing over to a Google account and just start working. And so it really is kind of a nice combination and that's kind of how I started sharing that resource was at the secondary level. And when I came to Fremont, they were just getting into Google Apps. The 512 students were starting to use it a lot and it was becoming kind of a really great resource. It was not open to the fourth graders and I kept saying, oh, if you want to try it, try it with my kids. I'll do it. I'll do it. And kind of my goal was there were some really cool Google Earth activities that we could do if they have a Google account. They can go in and they can create their own maps and kind of the book on the screen, the book mapping, lit trips and beyond is an SD publication. I did purchase that. It's a great resource for figuring out how we do integrate literature and Google Maps and you can go in and they can pin the journey of a character through a novel. It's such a cool thing and I really wanted to try to get to that point with our kids this year. I did not get to that, but we did introduce Google Apps and so this is kind of the journey of that process. I love my fourth graders. They were so open and they were so excited and so this is just kind of a how-to and maybe some tips for if you are going to introduce it to younger students. These are kind of the things that I would suggest and if I would do it again, this is how I would do it. So I wanted to be able to share that with you and I was really excited when Michael asked me because if I can save you some time and help you kind of organize the process, the smoother it goes, the more excited the kids are. So for my fourth graders, they were used to seeing Google products. I used forms and for quizzes for some of our skills checks and some L2J stuff and I used the Flubaru extension to correct those things because I have 125 fourth graders. So that made it really easy for me to give all the fourth graders a quick skills check, run Flubaru and just kind of see where we were, what areas are we struggling in, what concepts do I need to kind of go back and address. So they were used to seeing some of that stuff but in a test-taking environment. So they were pretty excited when I said, now you are going to be able to use some of these resources yourself. So here's what I would do before you let them log in. I would revisit email etiquette. I made the assumption that everybody knew how to email and that was not the case. So I would spend a little bit of time talking about why do we send an email, what are the mechanics of an email, the subject line, the content of the email does not go in the subject line and what kinds of things do we say and how do we start an email, how do we end an email. Grammar and spelling count and we did stop and revisit that but I kind of wish I would have touched on that a little bit more before we ever got to the point of logging in. Again, digital citizenship, I would definitely hit this hard. This is a huge thing for me. I just feel like the sooner we get kids knowledgeable about their footprint and what they're leaving and what they're saying, I think it just will make the world a better place. I talked a lot about if you send an email, you can't take it back. You have put that out there and there is no going back and if you wouldn't say it to grandma, then don't send it, don't say it. We just really encourage them to use the Google Apps for Education purposes because this is a school account. So we did kind of try to steer them in that direction but again, we did talk about if you're going to send somebody an email, it needs to be constructive, it needs to be meaningful. If you get caught doing something inappropriate, you'll lose your account and I'll make sure you'll lose it. I told them that flat out and I felt like they needed to understand that this is an incredibly powerful tool and it is a powerful tool for good but it can possibly be used for things that are maybe not so good. So I wanted to really just get past what can we do with this and what can we do with this in a constructive manner. I did front load the process a little bit and I maybe would have done that a little more. Google Education has really great videos produced by some of their Google Trainers who are actual educators and just talks about some of the different components and kind of how this is what you're going to see and this is the cool stuff you can do and you can write a paper and I can comment back to you at 7.30 at night if you're stuck and I'm kind of a 24-7 kind of educator, maybe not 24-7, maybe until 9.30 at night but my students always kind of know that if you're working on something and you get stuck you can tweet me or you can email me and I'll check my email fairly frequently and if it's before 9.30 or 10 at night if I can give you some information or kind of help you over at hurdle I will definitely do that. So I would definitely show them what's possible so that then they're pretty excited about what the possibilities are. If your district issues accounts with temporary passwords you really want to decide on do you want to use a standard form for those passwords when they reset the password to their own individual password. Initially when I did this at Lakeview we did not have a standard form and I had to reset passwords a lot. If you pick John Dear Boy I don't maybe can't help you figure out what that is I'm just going to have to reset it where here at Lakeview we kind of came up with a standard form based on what they were looking for at Johnson Crossing and kind of what their format was we kind of followed suit with that and that way if they were stuck and they couldn't get into their account I could say remember we changed it to this format try that and oh yep then they could probably get in and we were fine we didn't have to dig out the form and look it up. Another thing that was really important was we kind of asked if we as media specialists could have access to reset passwords that hopefully would keep us from bugging the tech department multiple times during this process and they were very gracious about saying yep we will give you access to kind of manage that so that if you do end up in a situation where the kids can't remember their passwords you can help them out kind of on the spot and keep them moving forward and keep them moving in with what they're working on in terms of their projects and stuff so those are the things that I would definitely do before you have them sit down at the computer and log in for the first time. So first steps day one I see my kids generally 30 minutes twice a week and so we kind of had to stretch this process out a little bit and so the first day we just we got logged in and that took us the whole time and then I also really wanted to stress with them logging out not to just close out of the browser log off your computer we did have a few situations where with some of our laptops the teachers had used them and they had logged out of the laptop but they were still logged into their Google account and so we talked about making sure that you log out of applications when you're working on them before you walk away and so we those are kind of the two things we did the first day the little checkbox at the bottom of the one account all of Google page we talked about you know remember to check it or uncheck it so that you're not going to stay logged in all the time I didn't find that to be always reliable so I just really stressed with them before you walk away go to your name, go to your email pull that box down and click log out then you know you've logged out of that Google account you can close out of your browser log off your computer and know that you're walking away and your information is secure so we really stressed that that first day go home and take some Advil that first day was absolutely overwhelming I felt like I had unleashed Pandora's box on the world and was just really not sure how it was going to go from there but one of the great great things about teaching kids is that they always rise to your expectations and a lot of times most of the time they absolutely blow you away so that first day I was pretty wiped out and it was quite a process and was really not sure how the second day was going to go but as you'll see the second day went much smoother so we got logged in the second day and their task was to send me an email and then they had a little bit of time to kind of look around and talk about you know find the different components that we had talked about with email and I wanted them to have the experience of sending an email to remind them that you know you need a subject you need to have your content in the content area not in the subject area and grammar and spelling count and it was an opportunity for me to model to them how I would respond to them and I did answer all 125 emails and some of the kids emailed their teacher I think we actually gave them an option they could email the teacher or myself and the kids that emailed me I did respond and I think the ones that emailed their teachers that also they responded as well but that was kind of the opportunity to model the email process and what it should look like and if they sent me an email that was like stop Mrs. S I emailed them back and said hey how are you doing I hope you're having a good day remember to make good choices and make sure you're using your Google account appropriately and just kind of model what I had been talking to them about previously and then day two-ish we opened Drive I showed them kind of where to find Drive how to create a document we kind of got that out of the way and then I also asked their teachers I had five fourth grade teachers who were just so excited about this process and they had presentations that they were going to work on and they switched from PowerPoint to Google presentation and I said go ahead and share those presentations with the kids so that I can kind of teach them how to open an email with a shared document and we were able to take a look at those documents so we kind of back up just a smidge the day that we looked at Drive we created a document and I didn't show them how to put images into their word processing document I think we opened up World Book Online and I showed them how to kind of get the image and put that into their document with the citation that was my big thing they all knew where to find a citation in World Book or how to use a citation so that was kind of a chance for them to kind of show me what they knew and kind of learn how to move some pictures into their documents because I knew moving forward they were going to be doing that with their presentations and we talked about how to delete a document we did a little bit with sharing documents we kind of had one document that everybody got to type on and that was really cool they thought that was awesome they could see each other typing and talk to each other but they also could see how easy it was for somebody to go in and make a big mess and so we kind of covered that and then recent documents kind of how to find stuff you had worked on previously so we did kind of hit all of those high points when we talked about Drive and then I think at that point we were ready to have the teachers share those presentations with the kids and we spent a day we opened the email we opened the shared document and I taught them how to save a copy of that document as their own so that they were not typing on the community document and I kind of encouraged the teachers to share that document as a view only so that no one accidentally did start doing their presentation on the original but it was really important for them to know how to save a document when it's been shared with you so that you can do what you need to do with your project and that was really exciting to get to that point and for them to just have that presentation template right there in front of them and they were kind of often running and so that was really cool they just blew me away they were just so into doing their research and dumping information in there and finding their citations and putting in pictures and so we spent some time in class just kind of with me as a resource to kind of keep them moving forward and answer questions so it was really kind of a cool cool end result of the whole process was having those teachers who were ready with something that they wanted the kids to do so they got to use those skills right away one thing I did do for our teachers was because I had all those kids in my classes I went ahead and I created a contact list or a contact group for each one of my classes and then I exported that and then emailed it to the teachers and a couple teachers went ahead and imported it into their own contacts a couple teachers I went in and I did it for them just so that because now everybody was on Google the teachers could start sharing documents communicating with the kids and that kind of just got the ball rolling a little bit faster so it was just kind of an extra thing that I did I knew I wanted to be able to communicate so I just shared that list with the teachers to save them from having to go and find all of their kids and create their own list and that graphic kind of shows you the process of how that works and that's kind of a cool extra just to kind of share that information one of the things that really surprised me about Google and 25 fourth graders I really struggled with the fact that I didn't get to talk to every student every time or really make a connection and Google apps really provided me another avenue of visiting with kids and making connections and I love this email I look at it on days when I'm having not such a great day spelling errors and grammar errors and I love the whole thing because it was something that this student would never have said to me face to face this was just a student that I talked to but I didn't really feel like I had a connection and I got this email one day that just said hey these are all the things I want to tell you and that is such an amazing tool and it was very unexpected and so all of the things that we went through and all of the craziness of changing temporary passwords creating standard passwords and getting everybody in and getting everybody out and teaching them about drive and just it got pretty wild for a few days but then the end result was I had kids that I do talk to and I do get to have a connection with but that kind of brought in the scope of who I had a connection with because a lot of my kiddos that I don't get to talk to or this wouldn't maybe talk to me in person they were sending me emails and they were sending their teachers emails and so we have this great conversation going that we could model good digital citizenship but we could also keep that relationship and that connection with them going if they had questions and I did have a couple kids who emailed me over a weekend they were working on their planet presentation and they got stuck and they sent me a quick email and said I think I just did something wrong and I'm not sure what to do so they really got to see firsthand that we met what we said and we said email us and we'll help you if you have questions so that was kind of a cool unexpected result of sharing Google with kids at that level so Google Classroom this I am so excited about it is actually going to be in beta I went ahead and applied for an invitation and I think June they're going to roll out to a few or several or however many educators and let them kind of take a look at Google Classroom my impression from what I've read and what they've shared with people is that it will be kind of like a blackboard kind of like an angel environment where kids can go in and they will have their classes and they can have documents shared with them and kind of a contained environment so I'm going to say very similar to Blackboard and Angel and they're going to roll that out to some educators in June and then it sounds like there will be a full rollout in September to Google Apps for Education Schools and other than that I haven't seen a lot they haven't said a lot so I'm kind of just hoping with my fingers crossed that when June rolls around that I get in there and really dig around I think that as powerful as Google is with the idea and the concepts of sharing and communication I think that this classroom component is going to take it to an entirely new level and just you know you're going to have their ability to communicate they will be working in a real world platform and just have some really great skills when they come out of our classrooms into the world because they will have already used the suite of products so are there any questions? Great Cynthia that sounds wonderful and I'm glad it's been such a success anybody in the audience who has a question feel free to either type that into the Q&A area Krista will be monitoring those or you can type in unmute me if you have a microphone we will happily listen to your wonderful voice not many people do that but we like to encourage so while we're having hopefully some questions come in I've always got several because that's my job and the first question I have is are you a one to one school or are you relying on students to have their own access at home or how does that work at your school? That is a great question we are not a one to one school we have stationary computer labs in the elementary as well as some mobile labs of laptops and then we'll be getting some iPads in the fall in our buildings so we are not one to one and one of the things that I loved about mobile apps was that we really have the flexibility of we could work in the lab we could work on a laptop and if they had a tablet at home they could download the drive app and they could do some work at home the drive app is not as powerful as the full website environment but you can still get a lot of things done and they are ramping that up just about almost constantly so it's becoming more and more powerful and more and more usable but I did have some kids they had tablets at home they said can I download the drive and I said yep download login with your login and your stuff should be right there and they were able to do that so that is a great question we were not functioning in a one to one environment and so for Google apps it's really if you're not one to one it's a great tool because whatever you have it will work and so then I'm going to assume you've probably got at least some kids without computers at home in one format or another or maybe everybody does I don't know but if so how is that working has there been any noticeable impact or have they been able to get enough access on campus generally in my experience at Lakeview and at Fremont you know we do not have 100% internet access for our students and we were very cautious about the projects that the kids were doing and particularly here in Fremont things were not required of them outside of class they made sure that they had time to work during school if you chose to work at home that was fine if you had that access and you were motivated to do that that was absolutely fine it was not something that was required because we are aware that we do have kiddos that don't have that kind of access outside of school and when I was working with kids at Lakeview the library was open when I was there and we had computer access for them so if they were able to kind of manage their time during the school day they were able to get everything done that they needed to get done but that was something that we were very aware of across the board in my experience sharing Google Apps with students is being very mindful of the fact that not all of our kids are going to have that internet access outside of school and had you with that had you have you talked or worked with the public library at all I'm assuming they have internet access I have a feeling we did have some kids that went to the public library and logged on and did some work there I know in Columbus I did have some kids I we partnered with them the Columbus public library on some different things and so I would kind of hear or the kids would say some of them went to McDonald's some of them went to the public library here in Fremont they can go and they can use those computers so that was the great partnership because the kids knew they could get to a computer at a public library and they knew they could get to Google and they knew they could log in so they could do their work pretty much wherever they could get internet access okay how about the back end getting this all set up working with the rest of the staff on campus who's actually doing the administration of all this is a very open-ended question here but somebody who wants to do this obviously there was much more you picked it up where it's all installed and it's running now let's work with the kids can you talk about before all that here at Fremont our tech department kind of coordinated all of the accounts and set up the access and kind of put all of that together and then when things were kind of ready they let our curriculum director Darren Kalberlau know and he kind of shared that information with us as a department I was ready and ready to go whenever as soon as this stuff's ready I'm ready to go let's go and so I was really excited when we kind of got the thumbs up that the accounts are ready the levels of access everything that you have to do on the technical end was taken care of and then we were kind of ready to go at Lakeview and we got to work pretty closely with our technology coordinator Tracy and the ESU guys and that was kind of it was all kind of set up on the technical end and then Tracy and I kind of worked together if we ran into some technical issues I was not part of setting up who has access to what and how are we going to determine what they can do when they can do it one thing I will say is that at the elementary level in the K-4 their email was only internal they were only able to email individuals from FPS so we did not have that open to the whole world and then progressing through the higher grades that access gets opened up a little bit as they progress through the district but at K-4 their access for email for fourth graders is only within the district only FPS individuals and I can't remember if third grade might be the same and then anything younger than that I don't believe that they had email they might have just had dogs so all of that was set up through the technology department and I know that that was a tremendous undertaking so I was just really excited and grateful that they were you know they got it going so that we could share that with the fourth graders before they left our buildings and headed to Johnson Crossing and hopefully that would give them a bit of a running start but we did like I said kind of ask can we have access to reset passwords we felt like that was going to be probably the one issue that we were going to be bugging them about the most and they have a lot of stuff to do with managing our networks and the equipment so that was one thing we were kind of hoping we could take off our plate so they did do that they were able to kind of give us that level of access so we could take care of those issues without having to go through them and bug them with stuff like that Well you make a really good point there I think beyond just setting up the tech it sounds like a lot of policy decisions need to be made as part of setting up a system like this Absolutely and in a bigger district that was kind of all they had to determine that there were a lot of conversations there were a lot of conversations about how do we want this to look and where do we want it to go and in a smaller district that might have been the media specialist might have been involved in that but my experience here was those decisions had to be made ahead of time and I'm glad for that because they tried to address every possibility that they could before we rolled it out to the kids so that it was a learning experience and not a technical issue So now it's time for my I always have like there's always this one awkward question which is was there any pushback you implied that most of the teachers really got into it were there any parents or teachers or anybody kind of going I don't want to do this I did not have any experience with that like I said I was like if you want to pilot this I'll do it I want to do it and that's just kind of me if you know me at all I'm not really going to sit back and go well let's see what happens let's do it and so I don't know if that enthusiasm transferred just to my immediate circle I have no idea but I really wanted it to be a great experience and I was so excited I did not have any communication from parents who said no we don't want this they knew ahead of time last fall it was shared with them that these accounts would be coming the students would be using this tool so it wasn't something that they kind of got blindsided by they kind of knew at some point everybody's going to have this resource and for fourth grade it just took us probably till February or March to kind of get everything in place and roll it out but I was saying back in September let me try it I'll be in 25 kids in a class I'll do it we'll try it we'll see what happens and that's just kind of me so I am happy to say that it was a great experience and when people really realized how powerful it was the excitement kind of spread and we had teachers that didn't really think about it initially were like let's do this this is going to be awesome so like I said the excitement kind of spread and made it a great experience which was what I was hoping for well good I'm always happy to hear that there weren't any stick in the muds or something in the process so that's a great thing so one of the things especially when you were talking early on in your presentation about digital citizenship and things like that and I kind of made a lucky comment to Krista that you know but they're all digital natives don't they already know how to do all this stuff and obviously we know better than that but you know you do get that what were there any things that really kind of stuck out as maybe surprised you that they didn't know or the kind of questions that just caught you off guard you know and I found this kind of across the board as I've taught digital citizenship to kids the concept of I can't see you therefore I can say whatever I want that never ceases to amaze me that they have that impression and I don't know if it's because they are digital natives but that's one of the reasons why I am just so passionate about putting that digital citizenship component right in front of them so that we address how powerful this technology is and how powerful it is to be constructive and get things done and to do good things and not to hurt other people or to say things that you shouldn't say but that is the one thing that across the board you know K-12 that I find kids a lot of kids just have that impression that if I can't see you I can say whatever I want and that's not okay and so I always tell them if you wouldn't say it to grandma don't say it because you can't say it back and we talk a lot about you know what you put out there now can come back to haunt you employers are going to check you out before they ask you to come into an interview and there's stuff out there that's unkind or inappropriate it's going to come back and yeah you are 11 years old right now but you need to be thinking about who you are going to become in the future and there's an awesome librarian the daring librarian and she talks about how Facebook kind of came back and bit her after she became a mover and shaker and some stuff that was out there came back to haunt her and she tried to go in and deleted it but it was tagged and she turned it into a really great digital citizenship lesson for us as professionals and for her kids and one of the things that I do is I really try to model good digital citizenship and I talk about I've been really mad at somebody and I wanted to fire off a tweet but I didn't or I just wanted to say something really starky to somebody on Twitter and I just I didn't and I'm always they know that I will show them my Twitter account we can take a look at it we'll see what I'm talking about for the most part they find out I'm pretty boring so they're not worth following but I'm okay with showing it to them everything I do is professional and I really try to model that good digital citizenship to them because I really want them to understand that what they say does not go away and you can't say whatever you want even though you're not looking right at that person yeah I think it's good to teach them that now while the system that they're using is kind of a closed system and it's not really out there to do that and I have a follow I have a follow up to that but I want to remind everybody that we'll happily take questions from the audience we don't seem to have gotten any in yet but just to go ahead and type it in the questions area here some of the things you were saying in that I was wondering if you had a rough idea most services like regular Gmail and Twitter and Facebook you're supposed to be 13 before you can sign up do you have an impression is like what percentage of your students even though we're talking 10 11 12 year olds already are on these services anyway a lot in fourth grade I don't have a real real good real good working knowledge of maybe who my kids are who are when I taught 5 6 and then 7 12 you know they were pretty clear about yeah we're on but you're not no we're on we said we were 13 and we got on so there's not a lot I can do about that once they're on so I really want to make sure that we're catching them and really reiterating the good digital citizenship skills and really thinking about our footprint before they get too far into their teen years and I know fourth grade might not seem like you know like you know they don't want them don't have devices and so we're not you know we don't need to worry about it but this is really a great time to start talking about it because when the devices are in their hands later on they're thinking about you know what we talked about that and this is probably not a good thing for me to send out into the into the digital twitter sphere and you know I need to think about who I am and so maybe catching them before the devices are in their hands is a great thing to do I don't think that you can start too early I've talked to my kindergarteners about you know how do we use the internet how do we stay safe and then you know just kind of working my way through one two three and four just which is why I love common sense media because they really lay it out for you and help you with you know lessons that are and activities and videos that are very great in age so you can really go there and say okay I'm going to teach the kindergarteners and we're going to talk about digital citizenship what's appropriate for that group where do we need to start and once you start that conversation I just hope you know that you can stop some of the negativity before it starts and have you read Dana Boyd's book it's complicated yet I don't think I have oh you should add that to my reading the social life of networked teens so it's a little older than the group we're talking about now but you said you were going to be moving up definitely she's been working with teens and talking about how they deal with privacy and how they deal with technology and it's very eye-opening and I'm about halfway through it I highly suggest it to anybody on this call it's complicated by Dana Boyd and I have just one last question and you mentioned your twitter stream and when you started your presentation Christ has been monitoring twitter and noticed you you tweeted on our show thank you very much but we have one question from that tweet you used a hashtag we couldn't identify and it was fpsttwt we're just wondering if we can be nosy and you could explain what that hashtag is absolutely I am you have another hour we can talk about twitter actually I'm talking about twitter tomorrow in Norfolk when I came to Fremont one of the things I forgot to ask was can I still tweet and at Lakeview I had my personal twitter account and I also had a library twitter account because I had older students and I knew at Fremont in K4 twitter was probably not going to be a variable for me but I wanted to be able to share the cool stuff that we were doing and the stuff I was teaching the kids and the things that they were making so I asked permission from the administrators and said you guys know this is who I am and can I do this and they got back to me with the parameters because ultimately we want to keep the kids safe and we don't want to compromise them in any way so that I had some parameters which I generally followed anywhere I don't show kids faces name names but I'll show stuff they did or lots of the backs of their heads just because I feel like we don't tell our story as a district somebody else will and I want to make sure people know that we are doing great stuff every day for kids so FPS TTWT is a group of teachers here at Fremont public schools that work with Darren Kalberlau who is the curriculum director and we are working on how to integrate technology into teaching what's cool out there what can we use, what can we share with our staff and I've done some tech sessions at my buildings just to share some cool tools and then the other hashtag which I didn't use is FPS Connect which I kind of bugged one of the administrators who's going to be one of my administrators next year and said you know we need a hashtag for the district I need to start that hashtag now and start using it so that as more people get involved and more people want to share the cool things we're doing we've got a hashtag and we've kind of branded our district a lot of districts in Nebraska have done that York Dukes and E.M. Wolves and NPS Panthers and so I was like Fremont needs a hashtag so that's the other hashtag I didn't use but FPS TTWT is just a group of people that I'm honored to work with at Fremont Public Schools who are as passionate as I am about integrating technology so whenever there's something cool with education and technology I tweet that out and tag that and they know that I'm trying to get their attention Alright and I guess according to Kristen we have gotten a question for the audience Yes we have a question it says I'm wondering about the blocks of time that were devoted to each day as you mentioned our library system does outreach in the schools but would normally get an isolated hour this could be used to introduce the concept of digital citizenship but what was the actual time commitment for the teachers and the timeline to carry out the whole project Like I said I see my kids 30 minutes for media class library media class twice in a five cycle day or five day cycle so everything I did had to be broken down into blocks of 30 minutes and so that's kind of why the first day all we did was log in log out second day we got logged back in sent an email next day we looked at drive so I had less than an hour and for this age group that was probably about right because it's pretty intense getting logged in and your username and the extension fpsmail.org and remembering all of where the dot goes and the at goes so for this age group 30 minutes was probably appropriate just the little chunks of time and like I said I see them twice a week so I did see them fairly regularly so we could kind of keep that stream of learning going older kids an hour would probably be okay because they kind of start moving a little quicker and but that's kind of the time frame that I had and looking back and I hadn't really thought about it until now but looking back I would say that was probably appropriate for the age of kids that I was working with because it was pretty intense it was a lot of information a lot to look at it was the first time they'd ever seen anything like that so you know I didn't want to overwhelm them to the point that they were like I'm not doing this again yeah cool and what about the timeline for the whole project from when you first got the idea to when you're you know when I guess it was full in effect how was that oh wow it kind of gets a little muddled because I'm gonna say we probably had six thirty-minute class periods to kind of get introduce it, get started kind of get our feet under us and then I think I gave them another two class periods as work time for their presentations and I was kind of collaborating with the teachers and that was really based on did they have time during their class day for the kids to work on stuff or did they need to use that time with me to work on those presentations and at that point I was clearly just a resource they were working looking for information putting pictures in, refining their presentations and I was there just to answer questions give them some guidance look it over that kind of stuff so two class periods was probably about a month for me would be two class periods per week and four weeks so I would say about a month and then we kind of ran into our testing window so that then it was just kind of hit and miss wherever we could fit time in so I would say about a month cool, good well Cynthia this is wonderful please tell me you submitted this to conference for the fall I have not oh you really should you should and I've got to say more power to you for doing this you know 10, 11 year olds and this stuff has got to be a challenge but rewarding when it works so like I said they will blow you away I will leave that first day knowing you pretty sure that you have probably a huge mistake and then come back the second day and you know we were off and running and I was so proud of them and they would say oh I'm going to change my background and my email can you look at this is this appropriate is this look okay pick about that and you know so they were asking proactive questions and saying okay I'm not sure and that's what I want I want them to ask me you're not sure ask me and so I was just kind of a messenger they are by far the stars of this whole show because they they took it and they ran with it and it turned into we went from this is really cool and I can talk to my friends to this is really cool look at all the stuff I can get done and that is what I wanted from the whole experience so they are by far by far the stars of this show all right well I think with that we will wrap it up thank you Cynthia for that that was everything I hope for and more I'm glad it's going so well and with that you're welcome to stay on the line we're just going to kind of wrap the show here I'm going to hand it back over to Krista I don't really have any news this month really the only thing is get another password hack if you got an eBay account you haven't changed your password yet please change your password because you need to so with that that's going to be the end of this month's tech talk okay did you okay well thank you very much Michael and Cynthia that was great we just have one comment awesome presentation Cindy and Laura has says um there we go that's what I wanted so yes that will wrap it up for this week's Encompass Live the show has been recorded so it will be available later today when it gets done today tomorrow um there we go so and I hope you'll join us in our there's a list of our future shows that we have coming up I hope you join us next week we just got this on the schedule um we're not you're having some scheduling issues but um next week's show for Encompass Live is going to be me doing the presentation actually I'm not bringing anyone on just me up by myself 20 cool tools for you in your library this is a presentation that I did at our basketball library association state conference last fall and I'm redoing it here on our show to get it out there and recorded um new technologies new tools um online video recording tools infographic tools um I see screen recordings social news sites collecting videos any all sorts of big things 20 of them though that I'm going to be sharing with you next week so please do sign up for that and if you are on order on for any of our other future shows and if you are on facebook Encompass Live is on facebook as well just like us there and you'll get notifications of when new shows are coming up when new things been added to the schedule reminders that today's show is starting up so you can log in on the slide if you want to so um if you're a big facebook user like us there other than that we are good for today thank you very much and we'll see you next week and on future shows on Encompass Live bye bye