Posted by Karen French, Instructional Designer, College of Education at the University of Texas at Austin

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

Editor's note: Karen French works in instructional technology support for the University of Texas at Austin’s College of Education, helping to train the next generation of teachers.

The freshmen who enroll at the University of Texas at Austin have grown up in a world of ready-at-their-fingertips cloud applications that they can use anywhere and everywhere. However, storing files in the cloud and collaborating on documents in real-time is still a thing of wonder to me and the faculty in my department, the College of Education – we’re old enough to remember the days of sharing documents with thumb drives, not to mention marking papers by hand. Since our students have grown up with Google, it shouldn’t have been a surprise that in 2011 they cheered our decision to bring Google Apps for Education to UT Austin for 50,000+ students and 24,000 faculty and staff.

Campus-wide, Google Apps and Google Drive make learning and teaching much more flexible. On a campus this size, in the middle of a major city (with major traffic headaches), not everyone can always be in the same classroom at the same time to work together on a project. Students are used to shifting from a laptop to a tablet to a phone and back, and with Drive, they can get hold of the study guides or in-progress research papers when they need them on whatever device they’re on at the moment. Our campus users currently store nearly 5 million files on Drive today.

Longhorn students hard at work while enjoying the sun in front of UT Austin's George I. Sanchez building

“I initially came to school without a laptop, so I didn’t have a single, stable place to store all my files,” says Valentina Rodriguez, a second-year student in UT’s School of Architecture. “Using Google Drive, and knowing that I could access all my files and projects from anywhere with a WiFi connection, was a huge weight off my shoulders, and let me focus on succeeding academically instead of worrying about where to save my projects.”

For all of UT’s professors, as well as the future teachers we’re training at the College of Education, Google Apps has been a revelation. It’s upended, in a good way, how we reflect on and think about teaching. Google Apps takes down the walls and time constraints of being in a classroom. Teachers can collaborate with students outside of the usual class times, making learning happen more organically.

The collaborative benefits of Google Apps aren’t just for the classroom. Our professors use Google Docs to work together on papers for conferences. UT Austin administrative staff use Google Forms to get quick feedback without the need to collect paper surveys or wait for email responses.

Since Google Apps for Education is free for schools, it’s a boon to UT’s budget, but there’s another long-term benefit: Students keep their University of Texas email addresses and Google Apps accounts even after they graduate. As we say, “once a Longhorn, always a Longhorn.”

To learn more about Google solutions for Higher Education, join our webinar with Georgetown University on November 13 at 12pm PST and with Rowan-Cabarrus Community College on November 20 at 11am PST.

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.