Posted by Craig Citro, Software Engineer

 (cross-posted on the Google Research blog and Google Cloud Platform blog)

Modern mathematics research is distinguished by its openness. The notion of "mathematical truth" depends on theorems being published with proof, letting the reader understand how new results build on the old, all the way down to basic mathematical axioms and definitions. These new results become tools to aid further progress.

Nowadays, many of these tools come either in the form of software or theorems whose proofs are supported by software. If new tools produce unexpected results, researchers must be able to collaborate and investigate how those results came about. Trusting software tools means being able to inspect and modify their source code. Moreover, open source tools can be modified and extended when research veers in new directions.

In an attempt to create an open source tool to satisfy these requirements, University of Washington Professor William Stein built SageMathCloud (or SMC). SMC is a robust, low-latency web application for collaboratively editing mathematical documents and code. This makes SMC a viable platform for mathematics research, as well as a powerful tool for teaching any mathematically-oriented course. SMC is built on top of standard open-source tools, including Python, LaTeX, and R. In 2013, William received a 2013 Google Research Award which provided Google Cloud Platform credits for SMC development. This allowed William to extend SMC to use Google Compute Engine as a hosting platform, achieving better scalability and global availability.

SMC allows users to interactively explore 3D graphics with only a browser

SMC has its roots in 2005, when William started the Sage project in an attempt to create a viable free and open source alternative to existing closed-source mathematical software. Rather than starting from scratch, Sage was built by making the best existing open-source mathematical software work together transparently and filling in any gaps in functionality.

During the first few years, Sage grew to have about 75K active users, while the developer community matured with well over 100 contributors to each new Sage release and about 500 developers contributing peer-reviewed code.

Inspired by Google Docs, William and his students built the first web-based interface to Sage in 2006, called The Sage Notebook. However, The Sage Notebook was designed for a small number of users and would work for a small group (such as a single class), but soon became difficult to maintain for larger groups, let alone the whole web.

As the growth of new users for Sage began to stall in 2010, due largely to installation complexity, William turned his attention to finding ways to expand Sage's availability to a broader audience. Based on his experience teaching his own courses with Sage, and feedback from others doing the same, William began building a new Web-hosted version of Sage that can scale to the next generation of users.

The result is SageMathCloud, a highly distributed multi-datacenter application that creates a viable way to do computational mathematics collaboratively online. SMC uses a wide variety of open source tools, from languages (CoffeeScript, node.js, and Python) to infrastructure-level components (especially Cassandra, ZFS, and bup) and a number of in-browser toolkits (such as CodeMirror and three.js).

Latency is critical for collaborative tools: like an online video game, everything in SMC is interactive. The initial versions of SMC were hosted at UW, at which point the distance between Seattle and far away continents was a significant issue, even for the fastest networks. The global coverage of Google Cloud Platform provides a low-latency connection to SMC users around the world that is both fast and stable. It's not uncommon for long-running research computations to last days, or even weeks -- and here the robustness of Google Compute Engine, with machines live-migrating during maintenance, is crucial. Without it, researchers would often face multiple restarts and delays, or would invest in engineering around the problem, taking time away from the core research.

SMC sees use across a number of areas, especially:

• Teaching: any course with a programming or math software component, where you want all your students to be able to use that component without dealing with the installation pain. Also, SMC allows students to easily share files, and even work together in realtime. There are dozens of courses using SMC right now.

• Collaborative Research: all co-authors of a paper can work together in an SMC project, both writing the paper there and doing research-level computations.

Since launching SMC in May 2013, there are already more than 20,000 monthly active users who've started using Sage via SMC. We look forward to seeing if SMC has an impact on the number of active users of Sage, and are excited to learn about the collaborative research and teaching that it makes possible.

Posted by Charles Best, CEO and Founder, DonorsChoose.org

Editor's note: Charles Best leads DonorsChoose.org, a nonprofit organization which provides a simple way to address educational inequity. At DonorsChoose.org, public school teachers create classroom project requests and donors can pick the projects they want to support.

In 2000, I was teaching history at a Bronx public high school. My colleagues and I dreamed of the microscopes, books, and field trips we wanted for our students, but we lacked the funding to bring them to life. That sparked the idea for DonorsChoose.org, a crowdsourcing platform for teachers looking to secure micro-funding for their classroom needs.

A few months ago, we entertained what we thought was a hypothetical question from Google: "What would it take to support every project in the San Francisco Bay Area?" We quickly realized there was nothing hypothetical about it when Google funded all 700+ projects a few weeks later.

And it didn't stop there.

Over the past few months, we've worked with to Google to flash-funded every project on DonorsChoose.org in 11 different communities.
We were inspired as we saw Google’s generosity and impact: $3.5 million in projects supporting 3,293 teachers and 288,331 students in 2,051 schools. For one-third of those teachers, it was their very first project to be funded on DonorsChoose.org.

Now, Mr. Craig can expand his school garden in Detroit, where his students with physical and mental disabilities grow fresh produce and sell it at the local farmer’s market. In Pittsburgh, Ms. Casciato’s AP Calculus students got graphing calculators and a bonus — individual notes of inspiration from their local Googlers. And Mrs. Barbeau’s students in Los Angeles now have a 3D printer to help them design and build a robot roller coaster.

Yet the impact reaches beyond the art supplies, musical instruments, and technology that over 150 Googlers hand-delivered. News of this generosity inspired more teachers in each community to sign up and post projects. In cities like Seattle and Los Angeles, we saw five times as many teachers sign up this year as we did during the same time last year. We've also seen more partners and donors step up to support their local classrooms. Google’s kindness has proven contagious.

This flash funding is just the latest initiative in our valued partnership with Google that has also brought coding and advanced science, technology, engineering, and math courses to students across America.

If you’re interested in supporting a classroom classroom, head to DonorsChoose.org to find your favorite project.

Posted by Stephen Konig, Product Manager & Sunset Photographer

(Cross-posted on the Google Chrome Blog.)

Chromebooks are fast, easy to use and secure. They bring the best of the cloud right to your desktop, whether that’s Google Drive, Google+ Photos or Gmail. Today, in partnership with Adobe, we’re welcoming Creative Cloud onto Chromebooks, initially with a streaming version of Photoshop. Initially, this will be available for U.S.-based Adobe education customers with a paid Creative Cloud membership—so the Photoshop you know and love is now on Chrome OS. No muss, no fuss.

This streaming version of Photoshop is designed to run straight from the cloud to your Chromebook. It’s always up-to-date and fully integrated with Google Drive, so there’s no need to download and re-upload files—just save your art directly from Photoshop to the cloud. For IT administrators, it’s easy to manage, with no long client installation and one-click deployment to your team’s Chromebooks.

Head to Adobe.com to apply for access!

Posted by Devin Sandoz, Product Marketing Manager, Google for Education

Editor's note: Teachers and students from St. Albans City School will speak about their trail mapping project in a Tech & Learning webinar, to be held Wednesday September 24, 2014 at 10am PST / 1pm EST

St. Albans City School in Vermont knows how to take learning outside of the classroom. Last year 7th and 8th grade students participated in The Light Project, studying the relationship between streetlight coverage and crime rates and presenting a prioritized list of repairs to local decision makers. The school was eager to bring the same spirit of community to a new project, so this past Spring they decided to hit the trails.

The Friends of Lake Champlain, a local nonprofit, had noticed that trail erosion in the nearby Hard'ack and Aldis Hill recreation areas was causing runoff and pollution to find its way into the local lake. Teachers challenged 7th and 8th graders to walk the trails and map the conditions online. Laura Eichorn, a teacher at St. Albans City School, explains their approach: "We designed this project to solve a real problem in our community. Students interviewed engineers, surveyed the community, gathered data on trail erosion, and interacted with a variety of adults in hopes of improving the local trail system."

The school decided to use Nexus 7 tablets for trail documentation and related research, and Google Play for Education to distribute apps, books, and videos to students. Working in teams of five and armed with their tablets, students used the MyTracks app to capture location information and noted areas of erosion, trail widening and excessive mud.

Students from St. Albans City School map trails in the Hard'ack and Aldis Hill recreation areas

Even though they didn’t have access to Wi-Fi on the trails, students were still able to use the offline feature of Google Apps on the Nexus 7 devices to do their work. Some students used Gmail to communicate with one another about their trail findings, others used Drive to share documents. They used shared Docs to input data and comment on each other’s findings. “The students quickly picked up on how to use the Nexus 7 and enjoyed working together on the devices,” says Matt Allen, an Innovation Specialist at the school. “Plus, they became interested in learning more about technology.” The data students gathered was entered into Google Earth so that Sinousity Flowing Trails, a trail development company, could map out and identify the areas of concern.

Teams used the MyTracks app to chart their location and document problem areas

An overview of a trail segment. Each pin represents an area flagged by the students

The work had an immediate impact, resulting in the closure of one trail for repairs and helping to preserve the park and maintain safety. Students are eager to learn more about trail surveying and mapping technologies, and St. Albans City School is now looking to return to the park reserves to dig deeper into the field of trail engineering.

Hear from Laura, Matt, teacher Val Loucy, and students from St. Albans City School in tomorrow’s Tech & Learning webinar at 10am PST / 1pm EST.

Posted by Ego Obi, Global Lead of Access for Education in Emerging Markets

What if students and teachers from around the world could work on projects together in real-time without ever leaving their classrooms? Pope Francis recently joined students in Australia, Cameron, Israel, Turkey and South Africa for a Hangout on Air to celebrate the launch of Scholas―a new education initiative sponsored by the Vatican that aims to connect 500,000 schools across the world to enable e-learning and remote teaching using Google tools.


A social component of the platform uses Google Hangouts to connect students and teachers globally, so if students at a middle school in Ghana want to learn what it’s like to be a student their age in Peru, they can teach each other through an open and collaborative environment. Schools can also post shared projects on the platform, like the “40 Days of Hope” project by Seton Catholic High School, which aims to raise $3,000 to provide parasite medication and feed 40 people for a year in Nicaragua.

Later this year, Scholas will integrate more tools through Google Apps for Education and Classroom to create an even more personalized learning experience for each student. The Scholas platform aims to foster education through dialogue because when students can share and communicate openly, there’s no limit to what they can learn.

Posted by John Cox, Software Engineer

(Cross-posted on the Google Research Blog)

Google is passionate about online education. In addition to our own Course Builder project, we’re also partners with edX, a not-for-profit that shares our desire for scalable, quality education for everyone. Their software, Open edX, lets people make educational content and deliver it online to anybody, anytime, anywhere. It powers their own site, edx.org, and is also used by companies and universities worldwide.

Today we’re very pleased to announce that you can now sign in to edx.org with your Google or Facebook account:

Until recently, users who wanted to take advantage of the high quality content on edx.org needed to create a new account first. This is a painful, error prone process―really, who wants to worry about yet another password? So we added the ability to use over 60 external authentication providers to Open edX, with support for everything from open standards like OpenID or OAuth 2.0, to custom university single sign-on systems. For their edx.org site, edX decided to let users pick between Google, Facebook, and a custom username and password.

If you run Open edX, you can also use this feature now. The authentication module is extensible so you can add any third-party provider you want if your favorite is not yet supported. And the feature is completely configurable, so you can pick whatever third-party authentication systems are best for your users, including none at all. It’s totally up to you.

By simultaneously increasing user choice, convenience, and security, we hope to make open online education even easier and safer to use, whether people pick Course Builder or Open edX for authoring and delivering courses. We’re very grateful to our partners at edX for working with us in this exciting field.

Posted by Lindsay Rumer, Chrome Marketing

(Cross-posted on the Google Students Blog.)

Chromebooks are college-bound this fall. Introducing the Chromebook Lending Library.

The Chromebook Lending Library is traveling to 12 college campuses across the U.S. loaded with the latest Chromebooks. The Lending Library is a bit like your traditional library, but instead of books, we're letting students borrow Chromebooks (no library card needed). Students can use a Chromebook during the week for life on campus— whether it’s in class, during an all-nighter, or browsing the internet in their dorm.

Chromebooks are a new type of computer that helps students get things done faster and easier. They have the battery life you need to study all night and are light enough to slip easily into a bag or backpack. With Google Maps, Drive, and Gmail, important information is stored in the cloud, so students no longer need to worry about losing documents, pics, music, and more. The days of losing a paper are over!

We hope you can swing by the Chromebook Lending Library for a little study break this fall. Check out chromebook.com/forcollege for all the details and spread the word with #ChromebookforCollege. And if the tour isn’t hitting your campus this fall, you can follow along on Twitter and Google+.