Posted by Leslie Yeh Johnson, University Relations Manager

(Cross-posted to the Google Research Blog.)

Last month we announced the Google CS Engagement Small Grants Program, which supports CS educators invested in improving engagement and retention in their classes. Today we announce the launch of EngageCSEdu, a comprehensive collection of high-quality open source instructional materials for introductory computer science courses that integrates research-based pedagogical practices for engaging and retaining students. Developed by the National Center for Women & Information Technology (NCWIT) in partnership with Google, the goal of EngageCSEdu is to support the retention of women and other underrepresented groups in undergraduate CS education.

The content in EngageCSEdu is unique in that each piece emphasizes student engagement in the classroom. The project team, consisting of computer scientists, learning scientists, and social scientists, applied current research on gender diversity, student engagement, computer science education pedagogy, and classroom environment to define a set of seventeen Engagement Practices for the classroom. These practices describe effective educational techniques such as incorporating pair programming, providing relevant and meaningful context, and avoiding stereotypes. The team performed a comprehensive review of all the material to ensure that each piece embodies or even exemplifies one or more of these techniques, "taking the guesswork out of finding and creating materials that offer introductory CS students an engaging educational experience,” says NCWIT CEO and Co-founder Lucy Sanders.

The content available at launch was amassed through an exhaustive survey of available online resources from over 3,000 colleges and universities across the country. This review process resulted in over 1,400 unique instructional materials from 120 institutions. All primary introductory programming languages and over 325 introductory computer science topics are represented, as well as the set of Engagement Practices mentioned earlier.

California State University Long Beach Professor of Computer Science, and EngageCSEdu project team member, Alvaro Monge says “The goal of the project team was to build something that is immediately useful for faculty, but will also persist and grow as a ‘living’ collection.” As such, the collection consists of individual teaching materials that can easily be integrated into the classroom, such as assignments, projects, labs, tutorials, and lecture slides. Additionally, all EngageCSEdu content is tagged with a comprehensive set of metadata that allows users to search and browse easily and efficiently.

The detail page for each piece of material provides a concise overview including a description of the Engagement Practices used, allowing faculty to easily understand how to incorporate the material into their classroom. Finally, rating, reviewing, commenting, sharing, and contributions of new material to EngageCSEdu are all available, ensuring that the community around these resources is engaged and that the collection stays fresh.

While EngageCSEdu is not designed to address all problems of retention in computer science, we hope that it will nonetheless become a valuable resource for the community of undergraduate computer science instructors. Maggie Johnson, Google Director of Education and University Relations, believes that “EngageCSEdu is a viable solution to help a broader set of students complete their computer science degrees,” and it is our hope that instructors will continue to use and contribute to the collection, ensuring a dynamic resource that remains relevant and useful in the future.

Posted by Cyrus Mistry, Lead Product Manager, Chromebooks for Education

(Cross-posted on the Official Google Blog.)

Students and schools have done some amazing things with Chromebooks since we first launched in 2011. At the Urban Promise Academy in Oakland, Calif., students are using the Scratch program to create their own video games on Chromebooks. In Chesterfield County, Virginia, students get access to feedback and support from teachers after school hours using their Chromebooks. And in Fairfield County, South Carolina, schools saw double-digit gains on their state performance tests after they started to offer Chromebooks, Google Apps for Education and other technologies to their students, who often don’t have Internet access at home.

A student at Urban Promise Academy uses a Chromebook to design video games

Schools tell us that Chromebooks fill three big needs: they’re easy for students and teachers to use, they’re easy to share, and they’re easy to manage. That’s critical for schools that often want to give their students the best technology, but don’t have a large IT department to support it. And it’s part of what has made Chromebooks such a hit in schools. In fact, according to IDC’s latest report on tablets and laptops in K-12 education, Chromebooks are the best-selling device in the U.S. this year. And they’re continuing to grow in popularity—in districts like Montgomery County, MD (more than 50,000 devices), Charlotte-Mecklenberg, NC (32,000 devices) and Cherry Creek, CO (26,000 devices), who have all begun using Chromebooks in 2014.

Beyond the U.S., countries are looking at how they can use technology in the classroom on a large scale—like in Malaysia, where the entire national school system is using Chromebooks. This week, we’re hosting the Global Education Symposium, a gathering of education ministers from 18 countries working to implement technology that will help them meet their country’s educational agenda. We’ll hear from education leaders who are exploring new educational models, and look at how innovative local schools are using technology to help teachers and students excel.

It’s been thrilling to see how Chromebooks—alongside Android tablets, Google Play for Education, Classroom and Google Apps for Education, which is now used by 40 million students and teachers around the world—can help students meet their learning goals. We can’t wait to see what’s ahead as more students around the world gain access to new learning opportunities through technology.

Posted by Cyrus Mistry, Senior Product Manager

(Cross-posted on the Google for Work blog.)

We've tried to make managing Chromebooks for an entire district as easy as managing just a few. But when managing hundreds or thousands of Chromebooks, you may want to know about changes that are coming before they go to all your users. With the Chrome Beta Channel, you can do that easily. When you place devices on the Chrome Beta channel, you’ll be able to see what changes are coming weeks before they’re rolled out to all Chromebooks.

To make the most effective use of the Chrome Beta Channel, we recommend you place at least five percent of your organization's devices on the Beta channel. This allows you to become familiar with new features before they appear on the Stable Channel and prepare faculty and students for any interface changes. You’ll also have insight into specific problems that might affect your school and provide feedback to our team.

Enable the Chrome Beta Channel using the Release Channel setting in your Admin Console. With this setting you can assign devices to the Beta Channel by organizational unit, making it easy to control who in your organization will see these updates. Chrome Beta Channel is now at your service to help you protect and prepare your school.

Posted by Elizabeth Sproat, Head of Google Education EMEA

Over a year ago we began working with the UK Department of Education on their mission to make it easier for schools that are moving to the cloud to understand the issues of data security and protection and ensure that their service providers meet certain standards. We wanted to be involved to help schools more easily find answers to their questions, and know which questions to ask in the first place. This effort resulted in the UK Department of Education's Cloud Service Providers checklist, and we’re delighted to be a part of it.

This Cloud Services Checklist covers important legal requirements including data processing, data confidentiality and integrity, service availability and much more to help ensure that schools are fully aware of their legal obligations. Guy Shearer, the Head of IT and Data at the David Ross Education Trust says: "This very welcomed Department for Education checklist goes some way to putting informed guidance out there, in particular in giving schools a solid sense of the kinds of questions they should ask before choosing a cloud service. Google's response clearly sets out how they comply."

Google Apps for Education is actively used by more than 40 million students worldwide, so we’re very committed to enabling teachers and students to integrate technology into their classrooms through simple-to-use, cloud-based tools. Our responses— thoroughly reviewed by the Department of Education—can be accessed in full here.

We also know how important it is that schools have absolute confidence in the security of their data, which is why we’re so happy to participate in this important effort. Educators around the world should know how their student data is treated by cloud providers. Transparency is key to providing schools the information they need to make the best choices about their students’ education and to feel confident that they are being good stewards. We’re thrilled to be able to partner with the UK Department of Education, and others around the world, by putting tools into the hands of students and teachers that make teaching and learning exciting and fun, and safe.

Posted by Devin Sandoz, Google for Education marketing

Get your spacesuits on -- INTERSTELLAR lesson plans are ready for middle and high school classrooms. Google Certified Teachers created 21 classroom activities around the new film from director Christopher Nolan, spanning a variety of topics and aligned to educational standards.

Whatever subject you teach, we hope these lesson plans get your students even more excited about it. Here’s a sampling of our favorites:

Gravity Weighing You Down, by +JR Ginex-Orinion
Students break into small groups, then design suits that simulate the increased gravity felt in the movie. They’ll complete a set of basic physical tasks with and without their gravity suits on, then analyze how an increase in gravity relates to an increase in effort.

Human Memories, by +Michael Hernandez
In the film, senior citizens reflect on their time in the dust bowl on earth. Students will conduct interviews with senior citizens in their local community about a specific time period or incident that they lived though and their reactions.

Mapping the Solar System, by +Shannon Tabaldo
In INTERSTELLAR, the astronauts traveled through this galaxy and more. To better understand the scale of their journey, students will research the distances of the planets from the sun and draw them in correct proportions and scale.

Recursion, by +Richard Kick
In INTERSTELLAR, Murph and Professor Brand discuss a mathematical proof that is recursive in nature, meaning the analysis referred to itself. This lesson will help students begin to understand recursion and how it can be applied to better understand our world.

How Far Away?, by +Eric Marcos
Determine how far it is to the nearest black hole, then create scale representations to visualize the distance.

Plan A or Plan B?, by +Moss Pike
Identify the assumptions and extraordinary risks that underlie each of the two plans the astronauts debate in the film INTERSTELLAR, then examine the forces that drive them.

Dust Bowl Planet, by +Will Kimbley
In INTERSTELLAR the world is going through a severe global food shortage caused by environmental changes that in a number of ways parallels the Dust Bowl. Students will explore the possibility of another Dust Bowl on a global scale.

INTERSTELLAR is now in theaters, so you can buy group tickets for a school field trip to the movies, then try out a lesson plan with your students. Tag posts and photos with #InterstellarEdu on Google+ or Twitter to share your class’ accomplishments. We can’t wait to see the results.

Posted by Robyn Im, Course Builder Community Manager

People all over the world use Course Builder to pursue their online education goals. Whether it’s professional development for educators in Australia or entrepreneurship courses for the general public in Spain, Course Builder helps teachers of all kinds create and deliver online learning. As we continue our own experiments in online education, we want to ensure that people using the tool can create content that reaches as many students as possible in the best way possible.

Rewriting content for an online course can be time-consuming. Course Builder integrates with Google Drive so you can insert content into your courses without rewriting, reformatting, or cutting and pasting. You can also create new content using Google Docs, store it in Drive, and deliver it to hundreds of thousands of students in Course Builder. We’re working to support other apps along with Google Docs to make this integration even better.

You might be familiar with the complexity of translating course content into different languages—creating it in one environment, and translating in another, often with multiple people communicating via email about changes and delivery. We’ve created a collaborative translation management system in Course Builder that automatically identifies and “breaks up” your content into translatable chunks. The course author gives the translator permission to work on specific content and accepts or rejects their suggested work. The software notifies the translator with any changes to a piece of content.

Analytics is an important part of Course Builder. We’ve added new visualizations and Dashboard metrics to help you better understand your course and your students better. Teachers of small and medium courses can now see scores at the individual student level to get details beyond aggregate data.

With certificates, Course Builder automatically gives students a way to celebrate completing a course. The course author specifies the passing criteria for a course. Students who satisfy this criteria will get a personalized certificate in their Progress Dashboard.

We've made a number of improvements in the current release which you can learn about in our documentation. You can download Course Builder and build an online course yourself here.

Posted by Sunil Rao, India Developer Relations, and Suhair Khan, Chrome & Education Partnerships and Strategy.

According to READAlliance, many primary school-age children in India have low literacy rates. In one survey of children ages 5-16 in rural India, nearly half couldn’t form words from individual letters. In another survey of fifth grade children, two-thirds were unable to identify the main theme of a passage they read.

To help address this, we recently partnered with READAlliance, USAID, the Centre for Knowledge Societies (CKS) and 10,000 Startups India to pilot the Chrome App Developer Challenge for Education. Run by the Google India Developer Relations team, the program encouraged developers to build Chrome apps for India’s primary school children with the goal of improving their reading skills and getting on a path of lifelong learning.

On July 5, thirty top developer teams came together at our Bangalore office and remotely via Google Hangouts to kick off the eight-week challenge. The developers, selected from hundreds of applicants based on their success in past hackathons, worked with mentors over the course of eight weeks to build and publish their apps. Content providers including Pratham Books and the educational cartoon series Chotta Bheem contributed relevant open-source content for the apps.

These 30 apps are now available for free on the Chrome Web Store. They represent a variety of fun learning experiences including interactive stories, reading comprehension quizzes, timed word-matching games, and a racing app that involves building complex words from alphabet tiles.

We announced the three winning apps — selected by educators based on the quality of their content as well as technical merits — on October 28. We’ll also feature them on the Chrome Web Store for three months in the hopes that even more teachers, parents and students will be able to access them. USAID and CKS plan to extend the reach of the apps by introducing them to schools for lower income children in India this year.

Visit the +Google for Education page on Monday November 3rd at 10:00 am GMT (or 3:30 pm India Time) to join the live Hangout on Air featuring the three winning apps. Education expert and TED Prize winner Dr. Sugata Mitra, will be joining the Hangout. Known for the seminal “Hole in the Wall” learning experiments, Dr. Mitra won the 2013 TED Prize to build a new kind of School in the Cloud where children can explore on their own and learn from one another using online resources. 

Congratulations and thanks to all who participated in the pilot challenge, and we hope to see the rest of you on Monday’s hangout.