Google Teacher Academy UK

I’m a relative newcomer to using Google for things other than a search engine – though I thought I was ahead of the game using tools like google scholar, google books and advanced search techniques!   I only even heard about Google docs about six months ago! But it quickly became apparent to me that they have a huge potential to support collaborative working and collaborative learning.  So when I heard through Twitter about Google Teacher Academies and Google Educators, I was surprised to find they were only in the US. And then I heard about a campaign from @tombarrett to bring the academies to the UK – what a fantastic opportunity to learn more, to share more, to make the most of the tools that are out there for us educators to use! And then came the opportunity to apply – right in the middle of report writing, half term, being a taxi driver/chef/jack-of-all-trades mum and all the other exciting stuff going on at school and at home! How was I ever going to squeeze it in?!?!?! There was an online application form to complete and a one minute video to make.

So I set myself a time limit.  It meant that the video I made is still quite raw, because I didn’t spend the time polishing that I might otherwise have done.  It might not be a brilliant application form. But if you don’t try, you don’t get anywhere – and this is an amazing opportunity to be one of 50 European Educators finding ways of effectively using the tools, sharing them with colleagues and supporting others – a collaborative learning journey! And, let’s face it, with the number of other worthy people who will be applying there’s a very good chance of me not joining them in London at the end of July.

So why bother? I think we have a wealth of untapped resources out there - there is a great twitterati using a wealth of web 2.0 tools   but there are so many more that I just don’t know about or just don’t use to their full potential.  And if it will help the learning going on in my class, or help the learning of my colleagues, or simply make life simpler and more joined up – then how can I not bother?

And the video? Making a one minute video takes MUCH more than one minute! This is how I did mine – I used xtranormal and managed to save the video – unfortunately my rough draft was the only one I managed to save, as when I went back the next day to make a more polished, more considered film, I was unable to download any videos! I subsequently found out that this facility had been removed from free accounts over half term – I obviously just got the first video downloaded before it became impossible, so used what I had, put it in moviemaker to edit it and add some screenshots of a wiki project and added a voiceover.  Some of the frames with writing should have lasted longer – I cut them a bit too much to fit the one minute time limit – so this is what I ended up with – not the world’s greatest film, but a great learning experience in itself and I can already see some uses for film making in this way with my class!

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