Eric Edens and Julia Stiglitz (Google)

Bob Friedler and Kari Parkinson (CompView)

Steve Nelson (Oregon Department of Education)

Our Vendors

Our Workshop Leaders

Thurston Elementary School - what a lovely place!

G Douglas Bundy

Paul Nelson

Cookie Monster and Sesame Street (for the theme inspiration)

and many more....

{In typical fashion, I forgot to publish this on time. The summit was great. :)}

After months of planning, we're ready to welcome our Oregon K-12 peers to Thurston Elementary for the Google Summit. The rooms are set, the Chromebooks are unpacked, the cookie jars are out, and the stage is ready.

The school will be full tomorrow, with nearly 320 Oregon K-12 educators expected to attend. There are great sessions planned, exciting keynotes on deck, but one of the most meaningful parts of the day will be the synergy that occurs when you put a lot of creative, caring people in one place. We'll snap as many photos and videos as we're able. Sharing is good.

G Douglas Bundy is this year's opening keynote speaker. I cannot wait to hear what he has to say. (Watch the video....) How can we go wrong with someone who is a life-long Star Wars fan and has visited a ninja temple? And someone who has blended music, technology, and education throughout his career?

The Oregon Virtual School District is a program funded by the Oregon State Legislature. It's a platform of tools for teachers: hosted Moodle classrooms, NROC courses, HippoCampus resources, hosted Drupal websites, and more. Along with the tools themselves, ORVSD provides professional development for teachers on topics including Google Apps for Education, Moodle, podcasting, flipped classrooms, and Mahara e-portfolios. In 2010-11, we provided training for over 1,000 Oregon teachers through events like the Google Summit.

CompView Audio Visual Systems has joined ORVSD this year as a sponsor of the Oregon Google Summit. Their family of vendors will be at Thurston Elementary and have generously provided lunch for our day.

Julia is famous for many things, one of which is her 32 Ways to Use Google Apps in 50 Minutes presentation.

She'll have 75 minutes on Friday, which allows extra time for questions and sharing. We can't imagine a better person to have extra time with for questions!

Julia will also be introducing our keynote speakers and showing off Google Chromebooks.

Welcome to Oregon, Julia! 

Jeremy's presenting one session on Chrome extensions for the classroom and another on how Google Docs are "Changing the Way We Write."

Michelle Doring teaches bilingual kindergarten and Title I Intervention students at Ash Creek Elementary in Monmouth. She is a ball of energy and a crafty person herself.

Michelle's session is Google Docs in the Primary Classroom. It's a Google Apps in the Classroom workshop that's geared for the K-2 teachers in attendance at the summit.

Thank you, Jeremy and Michelle, for volunteering your time, expertise, and enthusiasm this week.

We tried this last year with mixed success. We received great feedback on what worked and ideas for improvement. We've made changes that should make it even easier to attend the summit virtually this year. Thank you, in advance, to our WebEx facilitator volunteers.

Oregon is a huge state, geographically speaking. And we're all struggling with reduced travel budgets. This is our effort towards cost-effective professional development. We'll continue to refine it, both at the annual summit and the smaller training sessions throughout the year.

For more information about attending via WebEx, see the virtual summit section of our Information for Participants.

Paul created two very popular course templates for both Moodle and Google SItes:

Digital Photography (a Google Site template)

CyberSafety (a Google Site template)

He's also a charming, funny, engaging speaker. Lucky us.

Oregon's own Tom Luba will be presenting two Lightning Rounds at this year's summit. His topic is Google Apps for online or hybrid learning.

Join Tom as he talks about Moodle integration and teacher-student, student-student collaboration. (Kind of like in this campaign speech video...)

We're welcoming another Oregonian, Jon Labrousse. Jon will also focus on teacher-teacher and student-student interaction in his peer editing workshop.

Jon's profile photo has him dressed as a Jedi and his bio shares that he's "a performance poet, and a fanatic cyclist. And he does his own stunts!"

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Looking for dry, boring workshop sessions? Look elsewhere. The summit's for engaging, spirited, collaborative learning.

See you in eight days!

(Part two of a ten-post countdown to the Oregon Google Summit.)

Eric Edens has spent the past year helping school districts across Oregon with their Google Apps implementation questions. He has helped large districts create plans for managing thousands of users. He's helped small districts with strategies to allow older students flexibility while keeping younger students safe.

There are many tools built into the Google Apps control panel that help us do all of the above. We're excited to have Eric with us for this year's summit. He'll highlight some of the most useful tools in his first workshop session, Tweaking the Google Apps Control Panel.

In addition to his workshop session, we've built in time for in-person Q&A with Eric throughout the day. Maybe during a cookie break....

We'll welcome Eric to Oregon next week. The Google Summit is almost here!