Stairway to online collaboration

The May ALT-Newsletter from the Association of Learning Technology has a feature-length article about the APT STAIRS project. Read it here.

Presenting in Barcelona

Last week, Sarah Sherman (Project Manager) and Abigail Deamer (one of the APT STAIRS Demonstrator Leaders) attended the Blackboard European Conference in Barcelona where they presented at a poster session. The London International Development Centre (LIDC), where Abby is the Centre Manager, uses a GoogleDocs form to register members. The registration information feeds into a GoogleDocs spreadsheet, which acts as the Centre's membership database. A search tool for the database was developed to enable members to search for common areas of interest within the confines of the Blackboard area used by LIDC. The search tool is available as a stand alone tool, which is available here.

APT STAIRS back in the Guardian

The Guardian have reported on the gap between students and teachers using ICT in education and using our APT STAIRS project as an example of creating an awareness of this.
The article explains one of our demonstrator projects in detail and the benefits of using collaborative tools in the classroom. To read the 'Teach the Teachers' article please click here.

APT STAIRS demo at the JISC Conference 2009

Last month, Nick Short (Project Director) and Sarah Sherman (Project Manager) with David Flanders (Lead for Technology) presented at the JISC Conference 2009 in Edinburgh. The presentation focused on the concept behind the APT STAIRS project and was delivered as one of the live, demonstration sessions. Delegates were told how the Bloomsbury team developed the model of a simple, step-by-step approach to adopting innovative technology to support learning, teaching, research and administration.

This diagram illustrates the technological gap - observed in Bloomsbury - between students and staff (represented in this cartoon as Lecturers). Simple technology, such as GoogleDocs, can be used to bridge the gap at level (1). As users develop their abilities and advance the staircase, they can try out more challenging tools.

Read more about the JISC Conference 2009 here.

JISC Next Generation Technologies in Practice Conference

APT STAIRS project team members Sarah Sherman and Tim Neumann delivered a presentation on the concept behind the project and the skills developed by stakeholders as a result of the project. The JISC Next Generation Technologies in Practice conference was attended by members of the academic sector across the UK in addition to fellow members of the Emerge community. The conference, which took place at Loughborough University, provided a fantastic opportunity for Sarah and Tim to let people know the successes achieved by the project, leading to a number of interested individuals wishing to try out online collaborative tools.

APT STAIRS and the OSCELET community

The project demonstrator for the London International Development Centre (http://www.lidc.org.uk) involved the creation of a Google Docs spreadsheet to manage their membership directory. LIDC has developed a Blackboard Building Block, which uses the Google Docs Spreadsheet API to search for members with particular interests, presenting the results in Blackboard. This means that only members, who are all enroled into a Blackboard Organisation for LIDC, can access the database. All the documentation for the development is available on the OSCELOT website here: http://projects.oscelot.org/gf/project/lidcsearch/

Interview with Emerge

As the APT STAIRS project is nearing to an end, we are currently disseminating our findings to share our experience with others. Last week our Project Manager (Sarah Sherman) and myself (Project Officer) were interviewed by a member of the Emerge Community (Mitul Shukla) who works for Bedfordshire university in the Institute for Research in Applicable Computing department .
Mitul is responsible for researching and collecting data on the experience of projects within the Emerge Community. So from our hour interview on Elluminate we covered many aspects of our project from our original bid, our findings, our engagement with users, our choice of technologies i.e Google Docs and our evaluation plans. This information will be filed as a new case study to inform future Emerge and JISC projects, events and processes.

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.

Collaboration is the key

Our APT STAIRS project was reported in the Guardian today, mentioning the benefits of online collaboration within the Bloomsbury consortium. To view the article online click here.

APT Project Demonstrator Lunch

On the 11th November the APT STAIRS team held a luncheon to say a big thanks to all the demonstrator leader's contributions, and to hold a brainstorming session on Google Docs API developments.

For more details about the Demonstrator Lunch, just visit our Demonstrator Lunch web page, where you will find information on how we engaged everybody in our brainstorming session, as well as pictures and live footage from the event.

Bloomsbury Survey Results

For all you of you who contributed to the Bloomsbury Survey of Web Use we would like to thank you again for all efforts, as your answers and comments have provided us with some very useful and valuable data.

So for anyone interested in viewing the results of technology use across the Bloomsbury Colleges please go to our Survey Analysis web page. Here you will find a Report on our findings along with a set of graphs to represent the data from academics, students, researchers and support staff.

Back up Google Docs to your hard drive

You can now download all your Google Docs documents to your hard drive with a programme called Syncplicity.

Syncplicity is a file back up and synchronization service, that works with your Google Docs account.

Once that initial sync process between Google Docs and your local Office document folder is done, you can edit any document locally using Microsoft Office Word or OpenOffice and Syncplicity will automatically upload the updated version of the document on to Google Docs.

This is very handy if you need to edit documents offline (like in a plane or a taxi) without requiring a browser with Google Gears.

Also, if you create a new document in your Google Docs account, a copy of that document will get downloaded to the local folder so you always have access to the document even without internet.

At the moment Syncplicity is free during it's beta period, and is very easy to use, with it's colourful user friendly interface.

New Spreadsheet interface

The new Spreadsheet interface has been updated, to look and feel more like the other Google Docs applications - Presenter and the Word Processor. The menu tool bar is neatly compacted at the top left hand side of the screen to access all the spreadsheet features, and shortcuts for all the most commonly used features have been placed in the tool bar.

The Forms have been updated too, being able to use drag and drop options when creating forms, as well as providing a new feature called 'show analysis', which displays your results in a graphical representation.

Google Docs Screencasts

New Google Docs video tutorials are available from our website, just go to the 'Training' page and select Google Docs Screencasts.

There will be many more video tutorials to come on the Word Processor, Spreadsheet and Presentation applications, but if you have any requests on a particular tool or feature with Google Docs, just let me know.

Happy viewing.

Bloomsbury Survey Results

As our Bloomsbury Survey of Web Use officially closed last week, we randomly selected our 5 lucky winners, for the £300, £150 and 3 x £50 Amazon vouchers. The winners from the RVC, BBK, IOE and SOAS will be presented with their Amazon vouchers at the Project Demonstrator Lunch on the 11th November at the London Knowledge Lab.

We are currently working with the survey data, which we will share with you on our website soon. We will create a brand new page on our website devoted to the survey analysis, to represent web use patterns, which we will be using as a guide for our next phase of the project - Google Docs API developments.

Google Mobile launches tomorrow!

The long awaited Google mobile phone will be launched tomorrow in the states, which will no doubt run in competition with Apple's Iphone in the run up to Christmas. It's expected the Smartphone's will be released in the UK in November.

Google have kept quiet about the technology of the phone, so no one knows exactly what to expect, other than the mobile phone will run on 'Android', which is Google's own mobile operating system, and it will be touch screen with a pull out QWERTY keyboard. It will also have a built-in GPS (global positioning system), a tilt sensor for gaming and will be available exclusively on the T-Mobile network. We also expect that the new phone will be able to run Google's range of web applications, such as Google maps, Gmail, Googles new web browser Chrome and of course Google Docs : ) So hopefully we can start editing on Google Docs with Google's handheld device, and not just view!

How students use technology to learn

I grabbed this abstract from the Educause Connect website, which is a website dedicated to transforming education through information technologies.

"Students use technology in natural ways that allow them to do what they want: communicate with anyone they want, in the time and space that suits them best. Easily accessible and user-friendly, collaboration tools allow students to explore, share, engage, and connect with people and content in meaningful ways that help them learn. By relying on the familiar ways students use these tools, faculty can enable new forms of communication and engagement in the classroom, permitting extensions and variations of the informal interactions already occurring in classrooms and hallways, and creating new frontiers for collaboration across geographic boundaries."

To read the full report click here.

Google's new browser

Google have recently launched their very own web browser - Chrome.

Chrome has been recognised as being part browser and part operating system from it's multitude of features, beating other popular web browsers in speed, stability and search.
Although Google say they are not necessarily competing with popular web browsers, such as Firefox or Internet Explorer, instead they are attempting to provide a tool for todays web applications and todays web users. It has been recognised that the web is being increasingly used for online applications, and Google wanted to create a new browser to manage multiple applications such as Facebook, Bebo, Flickr, Zoho and Google Apps. So this is good news for us Google Docs users, as this will mean a much faster and efficient service with all Google's applications.

Check out the 10 best features of Google Chrome:

Google Docs Forms update

Google Docs have recently gone through some changes with the Form application.

With Forms you can create surveys or any question based form, and collect the data from a GDocs Spreadsheet. Originally you could only create Forms (which are part of the Spreadsheet application in GDocs) from a Spreadsheet.
Recently the Forms have gone through a few interface changes; firstly the Forms can now be created from the list page view (Google Docs home) from the New drop down menu, secondly there have been some GUI changes, to make the application easier to use.

New additions to the website

We've added two extra pages to the website; Google Docs Training and Demonstrator Projects.

The Google Docs Training page consists of 4 sections to help you get started with Google Docs. There's a Quick Guide manual to Google Docs, a help point to ask any queries you have with Google Docs and YouTube and Screencast videos on using Google Docs.

The Demonstrator Projects page has been updated, with new links to provide more information about the individual projects.

So have a look and feel free to write a comment on the blog...

Google V's Microsoft

It seems that we are not only comparing web based office suites, but also the platform giants - Google and Microsoft.

Since the explosion of 'collaborative office based suites' (such as Google Docs, Zoho and ThinkFree) Microsoft have since launched their own collaborative office version called 'Office Live Workspace'. Whilst there have been many comparison reviews on Google Docs V's Office Live, Google Docs appears to come out on top when it comes to the collaboration features. However, some users may prefer using the familiar MS Office interface.

Whilst the debate over Google and Microsoft continues, I think Google Docs should pay more attention to the competition from the new up and coming collaborative tools online, such as Remember The Milk and Seesmic.

Google Docs Vs Zoho Vs ThinkFree

Web-based office suites have made a transition. While at first they simply imitated desktop applications in a Web browser, the new collaborative capabilities have developed new ways of working and studying, creating a whole new market in the web 2:0 environment. They've begun to grow away from simply imitating Microsoft Office to developing personalities of their own.

Google Docs, Zoho and ThinkFree appear to be the most popular web based office suites, and they have all been written about extensively on the web, so I'll save you from yet another comparison review! But from all the reviews I have read, in comparing functions and features, Computer World's review is the best one I have read so far. So have a read or judge for yourself to decide which one is best for you!

Over 2,000 institutions worldwide using Google Apps

Carrying on from my last blog on the Google Apps Education Edition , the latest news has just revealed that over 13 U.S institutions have just signed up to Google Apps, bringing over 2,000 institutions worldwide to Google's cloud computing.

Jeff Keltner, Google business development manager, wrote in his latest blog post. "Google Apps Education Edition is gaining momentum: more than a million users worldwide have adopted it to embrace the possibilities of technology in education."

The schools that have recently signed on to Apps include Collin County Community College District, Francis Marion University, George Washington University, Indiana University, Kean University, Kent State University, Kishwaukee College, Loyola Marymount University, Montgomery County Community College, New Jersey Institute of Technology, University of Florida, University of San Diego, and the University of Virginia.

Since debuting in October 2006, the free access to Google Apps allows students and staff free access to email and collaboration tools. It's also been reported that it's quick and easy to set up, as well as being versatile. "Technically Google Apps can be up and running in a matter of minutes," according to a spokeswoman. "Some universities offer services to just students and others offer to students, faculty, and staff."

The Web is less about the individual and more about a personal experience of participating in a group for work and play, says Jeff Keltner, business development manager for Google Apps Education Edition.

Google are also launching a 'App to School' road trip - a 10 stop tour coast to coast to talk about Google's applications.