Education, Google and Me

It's been a few months now, my Chromebook still goes with me to every single meeting at work. From keeping notes on & offline using Google Keep, to collaborating (Google Docs of course) on a discussion paper while sitting in the local Coffice with a colleague +Aaron Burrell.

My use of Google Apps has exploded and I now use a plethora of Googles tools and extensions to optimise and make my work effective and efficient.

I guess there's almost a slight smugness about it. Mainly because all the things I worried about before no longer exist and everything I do use in my Google suite is so incredibly easy, it's almost laughable.

But somethings wrong, I feel rather alone with it all, yes other members of my team BOTH (yes three people in the team) use Google Apps effectively, but that's it.

It frustrates me, knowing that the rest the institution I work for still work using, certainly in my eyes, archaic technologies in their everyday work. Slow machines running XP, rather more worryingly now the recent lack of security updates and support has stopped, carrying around unsecured memory sticks. All wrapped up in expensive office suite licenses for actions that can be done now using free online tools.

Raising peoples awareness where the opportunity has arisen to talk about it all has been fun and something I've enjoyed doing, however explaining to someone the awesome 'features' of something is not a hard thing to accomplish.

Trying to articulate the difference between using local data and 'cloud' data is quite complex as the first element is so engrained. It's a cultural tremor for a single person, but an incredible cultural earthquake for an institution to overcome.

Having said that, I personally feel that's where innovation and people's enthusiasm springs from, when the infrastructure is crumbling around us and people are naturally forced to look elsewhere for answers.

I have a vision, a crazy vision, of my institution running the free Google Apps for Education suite, all staff members have cheap replaceable, not to mention highly mobile Chromebooks, all working in the cloud so we can collaborate without hundreds of emails and attachments. An IT department that fosters innovation and cutting edge technology, no longer having to worry about looking after ageing exchange servers or creaking staff machines.

Imagine, not having to worry so much about the technology and focusing on what really matters, the teaching and learning. The freedom to collaborate and share without barriers. Students collaborating on group projects with ease. Lecturers commenting on students work without emailing wrong versions and a support structure only having to support one version of the software being used, the most up-to-date.

Hold on, didn't take me long to find a case study from Loughborough University dated 2009 (Can you imagine the difference it would make now?).

Firstly and more notably:

Phil Richards, Director of IT, notes that “In any organisation, there can sometimes
be inertia against doing things in a different way. In this case, we were pleased
that the pace of our move to Google was driven strongly by our fee-paying
customers – the students. Strong involvement of students, right at the centre of
this project, was the key to moving this work forward quickly and successfully.”
Some immediate benefits as a result of switching to Google Apps include:

• £250,000 saving on server hardware, cooling and power over refreshing the old in-house email system
• Enabling new services – notably 95% uptake of Calendar, 70% uptake for Docs
• Retention of the student’s digital identity on graduation, which would have been impossible to resource in-house
• Quantifiable reduction in IT Service Desk cases and improved first line fix rate
• Broader and deeper engagement between IT and the student
• Feedback loop as ideas are fed back to Google and actioned

Secondly the Loughborough case study --> http://goo.gl/Z11SDO

Maybe not such a crazy vision after all..

Prof Ken Spours - Education Revolution Conference