Training for Havering Sixth Form College

Anna Campbell, Psychology lecturer at Havering Sixth Form College and sessional tutor at Birkbeck and the Mary Ward Centre met with the APT STAIRS Project Manager, Sarah Sherman, last week. The meeting provided Anna with a face-to-face training session on Google Docs and to find out how the tool is being used in Bloomsbury. This is the first dissemination engagement we've had with a member of staff at an FE College - and it went really well. Anna went away with some thoughts on how she might use the tool to support her teaching.

Discussions with the Google Product Marketing Manager

Last week the team and I held discussions with Andrew Chang, the Google Product Marketing Manager, to share our ideas about new educational templates in Google Docs.

Andrew was keen to listen to our possible template ideas, such as Lab books, e-portfolios and assessment forms and encouraged our creative ideas to help students and staff in educational institutions.

Andrew also shared Google's future plans with the templates in Google Docs, which should provide more flexibility and a more 'personal experience' for Gdocs's template users. So within the next 3-4 months we should expect to see new things from Google...

SOAS release another Google application - Google Docs

As mentioned before SOAS migrated to Google Apps in May 2008, changing their applications to Gmail, Google Calendar and the Google Talk (for instant messaging).
This month they have just released Google Docs, which they hope will encourage students and staff at SOAS to collaborate more with each other.

Google Docs presentations have been running this week to offer an overview of the features and functions available and to help create an awareness of the new tool.

The IT Team at SOAS released Google Docs to their all staff and students accounts 6 days ago and have not had any complaints or queries so far! It appears the students and staff have adapted to the new tool quite well.