Edu on Tour - Nov '18

In October last year the MoE announced their agreement with Google to allow the Chrome Management Licences to be made free for NZ Schools.   Hot on the heels of this announcement, my colleagues and I set to preparing the launch very first Google Edu on Tour event to be hosted outside of the United States.

The purpose of the event was to connect and inspire school edutech leaders with hands on experiences and peer engagement and was organised into 4 parts, 

• Reflection - We wanted to give participants the opportunity to reflect on the great things that they had already done in their own schools & record this as well as their intent for the future

• Acquiring new skills - Getting hands-on with Google’s tools, before setting some challenges to learn something new using some excellent third party applications  

• Inspiration, hearing stories from our hosts at St Mary's School in Northcote about their journey, along with classroom visits to observe first hand how students and teachers feel about the technology they use in their learning 

• Planning/mapping & next steps 

We had close to 50 in attendance including a diverse mix of Secondary and Primary teaching and technical staff, each person was provided their own Chromebook for the day to record their learning & participate in the hands on demos.

In planning the event, we asked for insights on where people wanted to increase their knowledge, most of the responses asked for

• Creating with Chromebooks, 
• Google Classroom, 
• Hands on use with Google Tools, 
• Practical usage cases etc, 

However, after just 20 minutes with Google Technical Expert Uzair Rana the question on everyone's mind was how to get the most out of the newly free Google Management Licences.  

We have seen the incredible market share Chromebooks have gained over the past 5 years.  Strangely, New Zealand is one of the only countries in the world where the Chromebook and Management licence had not been tied together at point of purchase, resulting in a massive install base of un-managed Chromebooks in our classrooms prompting the MoE to take action.

Chromebooks, like all devices can be a distraction without some form of management, and I don't mean using your N4L filter either, I mean down at the 'device level' management.

In the case of the Google Management Licence, its the ability to deploy a plethora of useful settings and policies to ensure you have an optimal environment for learning, such as:

One of the most useful settings is the ability to 'Disallow Guest Mode" Sam Gibson  of Google NZ explains it as follows:

 I describe guest mode as a button that could say “use me if you don’t want your teachers/school admin to know what you are doing on this Chromebook”. As soon as students use Guest Mode, none of the settings/policies put in place for the users on the domain will be enforced. - Sam Gibson, Google NZ. 

By disallowing guest mode, you automatically prevent a whole lot of 'distraction' from happening in the first place.  It has huge impact if you are using Hapara, ensuring students always use their school domain log in for their work keeps their learning visible.

But this is just one of over 200 settings you can deploy, and each one carries just as much significance as the one mentioned above.

 

I would really like to encourage all those of you reading now, who want to know more, to take a look under the hood of your own google domain.  You'll see that management of the devices in your network is intuitive and easy, you don't need to be an IT expert to get it under control.    If you don't already have it, get admin rights to your school domain, and start taking a look at the powerful features within the domain console.  

For a help and a full explanation of the features and recommended settings to deploy on your Schools' Chromebooks visit the Noel Leeming Google Education website  or reach out to me directly.

If you would like to host a Google Edu on Tour event at your school, get in touch: 

caroline.dewstow@nlg.co.nz

Thanks for reading,

​Ngā mihi nui

Special thanks to: 

Michelle Holly - Principal of St Mary's School Northcote

Sam Gibson - Google Education NZ

Fiona Coles - Google Australia 

Edmund Li - Google Australia

Uzair Rana - Google Australia 

All the teachers and School IT staff who attended and provided such great feedback.