Posted by Dianne Darlington, Director of Technology, Tullahoma City Schools

Editor's note: Today’s post comes from Dianne Darlington, a Google Apps Certified Administrator and director of technology at Tullahoma City Schools, a school district in Tennessee that includes four elementary schools, two middle schools and one high school.

Our teachers at Tullahoma City Schools have discovered (and fully embraced) the benefits of incorporating timely, interactive material into the classroom—whether it’s a recent YouTube video or a breaking news article. Recognizing that technology plays a key role in learning, we recently expanded our use of Google Apps and Google Classroom throughout our schools. Now, teachers across the district use Apps and Classroom to assign projects and provide feedback to students, and students in grades three through nine bring home Chromebooks to continue learning outside the classroom walls.

After passing Google’s IT Admin Certification program, I worked with our technology team to think about how we could further use Google Apps in our schools. Our superintendent, Dan Lawson, presented us with the perfect opportunity. The Tennessee Department of Education rolled out new standards for social studies at the beginning of last school year, and we needed to revamp our educational content for each grade level. His vision was to create digital textbooks that were highly shareable, modifiable and cost-effective. We decided the best way to accomplish this was by using Google Docs. Since teachers were already familiar with Google Apps through our 1:1 Chromebook program, the digital textbooks were a huge success.

A digital textbook is a textbook that lives on a desktop, laptop or mobile devices and is easily editable to provide educational content that is as timely and relevant as possible. Creating the textbooks is as simple as editing in Docs. Teachers often tell me they love creating interactive and engaging content by embedding YouTube videos, games, music and links to websites. For example, when the Curiosity rover landed on Mars, we upgraded our social studies textbooks to include a video of the rover landing from NASA and written content from media sources. Students are more engaged when they’re reading content in their textbooks about an event that happened within the past few days.

Digital textbooks are as fun and engaging for the students as they are for the teachers. The easy ability to edit encourages teachers to update the textbooks with pertinent information based on current events and new material. Whether a teacher wants to insert a recent video or make grammatical changes, she can update the digital textbook instantly. The new version is readily available to students via the textbook library on the class website. With Google Docs’ offline mode, teachers can even edit information when they don’t have access to WiFi.

Once other schools in Tennessee heard about our digital textbooks, they wanted to create them for their students, too. Six school districts asked to use our material, mainly to print physical textbooks at a price of $8 instead of paying a publisher $80, but some are also downloading them digitally and using a 1:1 model as well. Open-source digital textbooks reinforce our mission of relating content to the student, rather than teaching for a standardized test. With Docs, we’ve provided students more timely and engaging information, and we’re excited to roll out digital textbooks across all core subjects in the next three years.

Posted by Jaime Casap, Google for Education

Editor's note: During Education on Air, Google’s free online conference May 8-9, we'll be discussing how we can help prepare students for their future. One member of our opening panel is Jaime Casap, Google’s Global Education Evangelist. In advance of the conference, we asked Jaime to share some of his personal views about the power of high expectations to inspire students. For related resources, check out Reach Higher, the First Lady's effort to inspire all students to take charge of their future by completing their education beyond high school. Resources include a toolkit to host a College Signing Day, which many schools are doing May 1st.

I grew up in Hell’s Kitchen, New York, in the 1970s and ‘80s; it was a tough neighborhood that visitors avoided. I wanted out, and while I was the captain of my high school basketball team, I was way too short and slow to make it in the NBA. Despite the challenges of being a first-generation American raised by a single mother on welfare, I had help and support from amazing teachers like Ms. Riddick who encouraged me to work hard to develop the skills I needed to finish high school, attend college and graduate.

Research indicates that low-income minorities are less likely to finish high school, attend college and get a degree. Only 15 to 19 percent of minorities attend college and fewer than nine percent graduate with a Bachelor's degree. There’s a direct correlation between the level of education attained and income level. In other words, education disrupts poverty. While many issues are embedded into the conversation about poverty and education, I can personally relate to something called “Low Expectation Syndrome.” Low Expectation Syndrome is fed by the conditions surrounding low-income minority students. They see failure all around them. They see their childhood friends drop out of high school, and they see more of their friends go to jail than college.

What’s my response to Low Expectation Syndrome? As part of my role I talk to as many students and educators as possible. I don’t ask students what they want to be when they grow up. Instead I ask students to think about what problem they want to solve. I then challenge them to think about the knowledge, skills and abilities they’ll need to solve that problem. What classes can they take? What blogs and journals should they read? Who should they meet and collaborate with? What educational path will prepare them to solve that problem?

I tell students they have amazing capacity and potential. I tell them to ignore the negative and disregard the impossible. I tell them to use stereotypes and statistics as motivation. I tell them not to be ashamed of who they are and where they come from. I tell them they’ll one day be the person in a meeting who has a different and valuable perspective. To put themselves in that position, they need to work hard and get the education to solve the problem that motivates them.

I wouldn’t be writing this post if not for my experience with higher education, which is why I support the First Lady’s Reach Higher effort & hope many schools will consider hosting College Signing Days to celebrate students. As First Lady Michelle Obama says: “Education is the key to success for so many kids. And my goal specifically is to reach out directly to young people and encourage them to take charge of their futures and complete an education beyond high school.” As I tell students every day, the antidote for Low Expectation Syndrome is to have impossibly high expectations for themselves and each other — and then reach even higher.

Posted by Erzsi Sousa, Product Marketing Manager

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

Editor's note: We’re jumping into our Delorean to explore how some of our favorite historical figures might have worked with Google Apps. Today, on the anniversary of Isaac Newton’s knighthood, we imagine his research in a Google Apps universe.

In April 1705, Isaac Newton was knighted for his many accomplishments. Since we’re self-admitted history nerds (how better to appreciate the advancements we enjoy now?) we asked ourselves: what if the Isaac Newton of 1705 used today’s Google Apps?

Newton was one of history’s foremost masters of mathematical formulation. What if he had been able to archive and automate his complex formulas in Sheets? We imagine he might have used the product function, =PRODUCT(factor1, factor2), to test different values for his second law of motion: force equals mass times acceleration (f = ma) — showing how apples of different sizes fall with different rates of acceleration from a tree.

While writing his famous Principia, Newton might have solicited feedback from his colleagues, like mathematicians Isaac Barrow and John Collins, by creating a Google Group and inviting them to edit in Docs. Working in Docs would have been helpful for keeping track of his notes while developing calculus — it might even have helped to avoid a heated debate with Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, who claimed he discovered it first. There’s no dispute over who first documents an idea when there’s access to revision history.

Newton famously feared criticism and was no stranger to controversy, so we imagine he would have been a strong advocate of using technology to keep his research secure. Should he have any concerns about a collaborator secretly passing sensitive information to his rival, Robert Hooke, he could adjust the sharing settings. He could even restrict the ability to view, share, download or print his treatise on optics after he’d already shared it.

Newton communicated through writing by hand — it’s estimated that he left behind about 10 million words of notes, letters and manuscripts — but we think he might have used Hangouts for urgent conversations. If Newton needed to speak with his colleagues at the Royal Society about whether Leibniz was guilty of plagiarism, he’d meet with them face-to-face on a Hangout. Or, if his wig wasn’t looking particularly great that day, he could’ve started a group chat and shared pictures of his calculus notation as evidence (maybe even including a few emoji to lighten things up).

As a professor at the University of Cambridge, Newton lectured about optics and presented his research about the properties of light. He might have shared illustrations of prisms to explain rainbows and the color spectrum, uploading the images to a shared Drive folder rather than passing around delicate hand-drawn sketches. Using Drive’s Optical Character Recognition, he could turn his handwritten notes into searchable text. Old notes he wrote on refraction and diffraction would be easy to find and reference as he developed new theories on the nature of light. As one of the most important thinkers and scientists of all time, how valuable would it have been for him to so easily archive and pull up his every great thought and idea?

Sir Isaac Newton’s findings changed our understanding of the world around us and are still relevant to our lives 300 years later. But even more inspiring is the way his curiosity and intellectual daring influenced generations of thinkers to be relentless in pursuing new ideas — a principle (pun intended) that drives us here at Google.

Posted by Vidya Nagarajan, Product Manager, Chrome for Work

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

Editor's note: Chromeboxes help businesses and schools update employees and students with timely information and create a sense of community. To learn more about using Chromebox for digital signage and how it can help your business or school work smarter, join Chrome Live today.

Schools and universities across the country use digital signage to share announcements, news and schedules. Chromeboxes give students waiting in dorm lobbies for friends or standing in the cafeteria line for lunch the opportunity to learn about campus events on the go. And digital signage apps for Chrome built by Rise Vision, one of our content partners, power many of these digital experiences that go beyond traditional campus fliers.

Here are three ways academic institutions are using Chromeboxes for digital signage to better engage and inform students:

Personalizing content at Siena College

Siena College, a private liberal arts college in Loudonville, New York, prizes its close-knit community of 3,000 students. In this intimate class setting, individual departments manage their own content featured on Chromeboxes for display. IT and display managers don’t have to be involved in day-to-day content updates, and each department is nimble and flexible with their content. For example, the Student Senate features content from the athletics and academic departments on several of its screens and those departments directly update their content to ensure it’s relevant and timely.

Cutting IT costs and time at University of Toronto Mississauga

The University of Toronto Mississauga uses its 25 digital signage displays to profile professors, highlight research projects and market events to their more than 12,600 undergraduate students. Their previous display technology required extensive IT time to configure and update. Since Chromeboxes automatically update with new features and security fixes, IT can spend time on other tasks. Chromeboxes have also freed up the University’s budget, since they’re much more affordable than their previous display equipment, which cost $1,300.

Reducing power use at Manor Independent School District

The 20 digital signage displays in the Manor Independent School District notify the 8,000 K-12 students about announcements, lunchroom menus, upcoming events and recent posts from a live Twitter feed. Previously, the schools relied on netbooks to power their screens, which consumed a lot of power, were noisy and crashed often. Chromeboxes, which don’t have fans or spinning hard drives, were a natural fit as the district sought more eco-friendly display solutions. As universities and school districts continue improving their digital display technology, they’re finding better ways to deliver informative and entertaining content to teachers and current and prospective students. Join Chrome Live to learn how to use Chromebox for digital signage at your school.

Posted by Hugh Lynch, Software Engineer

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

We built Classroom to help teachers spend less time on paperwork, and more time with their students. Since we launched, we’ve also heard from teachers and professors that they’d love to be able to use Classroom to collaborate with other educators.

Teach together: Whether it’s a substitute, a teacher’s aide or a department chair, almost every teacher and professor is supported by other educators. So starting today, you can have multiple teachers in a Classroom class. To try it out, just go to your class’s About page and click “Invite teacher.” Additional teachers can do almost everything the primary teacher can do: they can create assignments or announcements, view and grade student submissions, participate in the comments on the class “stream,” invite students and even get email notifications – everything except delete the class.

Dani Raskin, a special education teacher at Clarkstown High School South in New York, has been helping us test out this new feature. “It’s really important for me to be able to work closely with other teachers who also teach my students, but we don’t always have prep time together,” Dani said. “We are now able to split the workload: both of us can provide direct feedback via comments and grading. It really fosters an authentic sense of teamwork and collaboration."

Prep for your classes in advance: We know how much planning goes into every class you teach, and now we’re making it a little bit easier to do some of that planning in Classroom. You can save announcements and assignments as “drafts” and wait to send them to students until you’re ready. And similar to Gmail, any time you start creating a new announcement or assignment, it’ll be automatically saved as a draft. This works with multiple teachers as well, so all the teachers in a class can collaboratively prep assignments in advance, and even make changes to each other’s posts on the fly.

We’re also making some other updates you’ve told us will make Classroom easier to use:

• Autosaved grades: If you can’t get all of your assignments graded in one session, but still want to return them to students at the same time, grades will now be auto saved as you enter them. You can choose when to return them to students.
• Better notifications: Teachers and students will now receive email notifications when a private comment is left on an assignment. 

For schools here in North America and in Europe, we know you’re working hard as you round the corner into the end of the year. We are, too, and we’ll have more Classroom news for you before school’s out for summer.

Posted by Zoe Tabary, Editor-Thought Leadership, Economist Intelligence Unit

(Cross-posted on The Google for Work blog)

Editor's note: During Education on Air, Google’s free online conference May 8-9, we'll be discussing how we can help prepare our students for their future. To investigate this issue in more depth, we commissioned The Economist Intelligence Unit to conduct global surveys of senior business executives, teachers, and students, ages 11-17 and 18-25. Editor Zoe Tabary will share the findings during the kickoff session for Education on Air, but here’s a preview.

As technology becomes more pervasive, traditional trades disappear and the world of work becomes more globalised, the skills considered to be valuable for the future are shifting.

Problem solving, team working, and communication (a trifecta commonly known as “21st century skills”) are the most-needed skills in the workplace, according to our recent surveys of business executives, students and teachers. Digital literacy and creativity— and the latter’s close relative, entrepreneurship—are expected to grow more important in the next three years.

Business survey: Which of the following would you say are the most critical skills for employees in your organisation to possess today? Select up to three.

Source: Economist Intelligence Unit

Incorporating these skills in existing education systems, however, is far from straightforward. Teachers report that lack of time in a strictly regulated curriculum is the biggest barrier to teaching 21st century skills, while digital literacy is one of the areas where they would most like further training (31%).

Meanwhile, the young have become more comfortable learning on their own, especially on topics of interest: 62% of teachers report that students are becoming more independent and able to gather information themselves. As one expert interviewed for the report puts it, “young people have an innate affinity with technology, and it would be a shame not to utilise that effectively”.

Countries all over the world are devising new innovative approaches to teaching and learning based on these changing trends. For example Singapore’s ‘Teach less, learn more’ initiative aims to help schools and teachers to engage more effectively with students, so that they connect with what they are they are learning and how and why they are learning it.

To hear more about the full research findings, register for the free online conference.

Posted by Tia Lendo, Head of North America Education Marketing 

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

Last month we announced Education on Air — our free online conference taking place May 8-9, 2015 — and asked what you wanted to hear about. Today we released the schedule of sessions, based largely on what we heard from you. We’ll emphasize innovation — 44% of you voted for this — as well as how to empower students and use Google tools effectively. It was clear from our second poll that you also want practical examples, so our speakers will go beyond theory and share their specific advice for enacting change.

Here’s a look at what you can expect over the two-day conference:

Friday, May 8: Leading for the future

Tune in from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. ET to hear from educators, business and policy leaders, students and researchers, whose keynotes will challenge you to innovate and improve education. In our kickoff session, panelists will tackle the question “What are the skills of the future?” and will touch upon results from an Economist Intelligence Unit survey. You’ll also hear panels of different perspectives about some hot topics for educators, including how technology is transforming learning and how students are guiding their own learning.

In addition to these panels, our keynote speakers will share their personal passions for the future of education. You’ll hear from Actor, Education Advocate, and Host of Reading Rainbow LeVar Burton, Google Senior Vice President of People Operations Laszlo Bock, education leader and Order of Canada honoree Michael Fullan, and Sir Michael Barber, chief education advisor to Pearson and former Chief Adviser to the Secretary of State for Education during the first term of British Prime Minister Tony Blair. Educators and school leaders like Ryan Bretag, education researcher and Chief Innovation Officer of Illinois’ District 225, and students like Brittany Wenger (2012 Google Science Fair winner) will also share their perspectives.

Saturday, May 9: Shaping the classroom today

Over 100 sessions will be led by educators from 12 countries and 29 U.S. states, all specifically designed to offer practical advice and examples. Whether you’re interested in the track for educators, administrators, IT or “anyone,” we invite you to join for the sessions that are most interesting to you. 

Presenters will discuss tools and techniques that you can implement easily, affordably and immediately. Many sessions highlight how Google tools like Google Apps, Earth, Chromebooks and Android tablets can support learning and help educators save time. Others will relate to themes including collaboration and community, computer science and STEM, creation and creativity, digital citizenship, literacy and professional development.

Here’s a flavor of the range of sessions:

• Guy Shearer, Head of IT for the David Ross Education Trust in the UK will lead “Create impact by rolling out Chromebooks across a network of schools” at 8:30 a.m. ET
• Kim Meldrum, Pedagogical Consultant for the Lester B. Pearson School Board in Canada will lead a session on “Developing literacy with Google Apps” at 11:00 a.m. ET
• Sean Beavers, Digital Information Specialist at the West Morris Regional High School District will lead "Fostering student genius: empowering student leadership through technology" at 12:15 p.m. ET
• Tonia Dousay, Assistant Professor at the University of Wyoming will lead a session called “Bringing the maker movement to your classroom” at 12:30 p.m. ET
• James Sanders, Director of Innovation for the EdTechTeam will lead “How to survive a zombie apocalypse using Google Apps” at 3:00 p.m. ET

Visit the Education on Air site to see the full line-up of sessions and make sure to register; because even if you can’t join us live, if you register we’ll notify you when the recordings are available to view.

We hope to “see” you there!