 Special thanks to: 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.... photo credit: rwentechaney on Flickr |
{In typical fashion, I forgot to publish this on time. The summit was great. :)} 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? I don't think we can go wrong. In addition to being cool, G is a native Oregonian and Google Certified Teacher (Sydney, Australia cadre). Welcome to the Google Summit, G. Inspire us. |
 {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. photo credit: rwentechaney on Flickr |
 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. |
 I thought it was worth mentioning that this is only the second time we have met face-to-face on this planning journey. We have regular, Friday morning conference calls on WebEx. During those calls, we use Google Docs to review our list of deliverables for that Friday and plan our list of to-dos for the coming Friday. This summit website is built entirely in Google Sites. The registration forms are Google Forms and all of the mail merging for email has been happening right inside of Google Spreadsheets. We're using moderator for our Hot Topics. We're also using the related Google Products of Picasa (for our photos of the day), YouTube for our videos, and even Google maps for our Sherwood directions. We were all Google Apps users before this summit (see Paul's blog post, but I think it's safe to say that we've become Google aficionados. Looking forward to tomorrow.... {Rachel} |
We're all looking forward to seeing you this year. Come on October 14 ready to share and learn! It should be a full day of fun for you and fun for your brain. People from all over the Northwest will be sharing their Google experiences with you. Bring your best questions. I'm particularly excited about our keynote speakers. Paul Nelson is newly retired and the teaching profession is already missing him. As an instructional technologist and Google Certified Trainer Paul has been (and will probably continue to be) Oregon's best Google proselytizer. When you call Paul's Google Voice number, you get an explanation (and an endorsement) of how Google Voice works! I feel lucky to have been able to travel and teach with Paul over the last year (thank you, Google). Our conversations about education and technology have been a valuable learning experience for me. Paul is a perfect person to talk about the changes in education because of technology. G Douglas Bundy will speak to us in the morning. Doug has recently become a Google Certified Teacher after time spent at Google's teacher event in Australia! His music background brings unique experiences in relation to technology. I feel fate has introduced me (through YouTube) to Doug at a very important time in our Google careers. In talking to Rachel last night I realized (and she verbalized) that we *think* we have our fingers on the pulse of all the Googlie things happening in Oregon...and we don't. I'm not sure it's possible. Either way, I'm glad Doug is part of Oregon's Google family and that he's advocating for quality technology use by our kids and teachers. NOTE: POSTS PAST THIS ONE ARE FROM THE 2010 OREGON GOOGLE SUMMIT |
 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. Photo credit: CC Chapman. (May we all be this excited on Friday.) |
 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. |
 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!" 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! |
Did you know October is National Cookie month here in the United States?? Neither did we! Really.... But, the theme for this year's ORVSD/Compview Google Summit is The Year of the Cookie. (We didn't plan it this way, but are pretty darn excited that we're summiting during National Cookie Month.) We'll be posting in this space each day from now until the summit on Friday, October 14. For today, we bring you cookies. Cookie Monster and a great session on Google Calendar by Amy Alexander, Calendar Cookie Jar. Amy and our other presenters will be finishing their workshop pages this week. Stay tuned for great content and links. We have just a few spots left for attendees. Register now! And we'll see you next week. |
 Thanks to all who helped make this possible, including: ORVSD (the Oregon Virtual School District) Oregon Department of Education Google! Sherwood School District (especially our great helpers you see on the left) Steve Nelson, ODE Dennis Dempsey, High Desert ESD Jaime Casap, Google ...and many others. More official thanks coming soon! For now, I need to go do some Googling. {Rachel} |
For most of my teacher life, access to information was too expensive, too complicated, too slow, too difficult and too far away. Now we're bringing free, simple, easy-to-use, access to students all over the world. It will change their lives. It will change the world. The Google Mission Statement is, "To organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful." There are some who don't want this to happen but they'll have to step aside. The desire for learning and the rush that comes from contributing to the world's information commons is addicting. Linus Torvalds when asked what he would have done had he not invented Linux said, "I don't know but I hope my life would be meaningful in some other way." With Google Apps, we can make learning, thinking, creating, sharing and celebrating life meaningful for our students. How cool is that? ;-) Paul Nelson Make things better. |
 Wow. We're approaching summit day. Quickly. A few housekeeping notes: 1) Thanks for registering for your workshops as we're still building session pages. :) We envisioned this summit as a fairly laid-back event. Not quite an un-conference, but not a formal conference, either. Our presenters are passionate about their craft, but they also have day jobs. And kids. And soccer teams to coach. And airplanes to fly. We've asked them to carve extra time out of those priorities and they've done so willingly. Finishing presentations and adding the details to the workshops page continues throughout this week. Stay tuned. 2) If you tweet or blog or youtube or.... Please consider using the #googleSummit hashtag for this event. 3) We'll send a reminder tomorrow. If you haven't registered for your sessions yet, please do so! More soon... {Rachel} |
American Dream in the Sun  Two words, my friends. Two words.
Paul. Nelson.
Many of you know Paul. You know he's one of the most vibrant education technology leaders in our state and a Google evangelist extraordinaire. He was a Google freak before Google was cool. Paul is also a member of the Oregon Virtual School District Training Team. (It's not really a school district. Long story. But it's a great resource.)
Paul and the other members of our training team met in Corvallis this past June to map out our strategy for the coming year. Google and ODE had announced the exciting Apps deal earlier in the spring and we wanted to hit the ground running once teachers came back to classrooms. We had put in a couple long days of work and were winding down at American Dream Pizza. (I think the Marilyn Monroe was our favorite, if memory serves.) It was summer. We were all officially on break. We were just talking.
Paul said, casually, let's do a Google Summit. We all loved the idea. I took some notes. Sure. Sounds good. Did I mention it was summer?
We all left Corvallis and went our separate ways for a month or so. When we talked next, it was August. Paul mentioned, "Oh, yeah. We've got Sherwood High School reserved for October 8 for the Google Summit. I think we can do this, team."
Corin said, "Paul! I spend a year planning an event of this size."
Steve sighed.
Virginia said, "Oh. Wow."
Rachel gulped and opened up a Google Spreadsheet.
I'm proud to say that Paul's faith was well placed. We're hosting a one-day conference with a full panel of speakers and topics. It's casual. Some of it has come together the week before instead of six months before. BUT, in the spirit of modern technology and even more modern budget constraints, we're doing a lot with a little. And I'm excited to show it off.
See you all next week.
{Rachel} |