Productivity/Collaboration Meeting with #abed

Darcy, Shelley and myself ventured down to Edmonton Wednesday for a meeting with Alberta Education and participating schools with regards to productivity and collaboration.  Say what?!?!

Peace Wapiti is working on a productivity solution for students.  We have lots of tools at our disposal to access our information.  Both staff and students can use Ecommunity or MyDocuments, to have access to their files and assignments where ever they are.  Teachers also have access to Citrix which allows them to work on their desktop and have access to programs like Word, PowerPoint and Excel.  Alberta teachers also have access to preferential pricing for the office suite.  We are missing this piece for students to have reasonable, inexpensive access to these tools. 

Working with Edmonton Public School Board and Fort McMurray Catholic School Board we are looking at ways to for students to have better access to the tools they need, where they are.  EPSB and FMCSB are exploring Google Apps while we are exploring Live@Edu

Simply Live@Edu gives PWSD students access to Word, PowerPoint and OneNote in the cloud.  This means you do not have to have these programs installed on your computer but rather just have an Internet connection for it to work.  So students can be at home, the library, the mall or at school and have access to the documents and programs they need.   It also offers some unique ways for students to collaborate on a document all at one time. 

Currently Savanna , Harry Balfour and La Glace are working on this trial with us but we are always looking for interested teachers and classrooms.  If you think this is something you would be interested in, please contact myself or Shelley and we will get your logins set up and provide some support to get you started!

5 Things I Learned at #atle10

1) It's about relationships! I met so many people in real life for the first time. They were just as open, genuine, caring, willing to listen and share as they are in the virtual world. So many new friend were made too, some of even connected to find out we live just down the road from one another. And it is always nice to spend time face to face with the Northern Tech Group. Significant steps forward we made in creating a provincial Moodle sharing spot. It was about the people!

2) iPods are for entertainment and education. I attended an awesome session about Chinook's Edge iPod project. Terry-Ann Robertson is so excited about the project and the changes she has seen in her school that you can't help but be excited along with her. I tried to get all the apps she mentioned down, but she was flying, and promised us a website in the near future. I am wondering if I can swing down for a visit, I would love to see their project in action.

3) Google Apps or Live @ Edu ? Does it matter? There was lots of sharing about what these cloud computing tools can do for students! For students! These tools hold the potential for students to have the anytime, anywhere, anyplace access that is needed.

4) Twitter was fast and furious and I think we have a few converts. Every session I was in had someone helping show twitter or tweetdeck or hashtags. Lots of covert looking at name tags, happy introductions and trying to figure out who actually looks like their avatar. We even had a few twitter stalking moments as people finally met up for the first time.

5) I love elluminate! I got to help moderate the elluminate sessions and learn from the master himself Pat Bohnet.

For each session our virtual room filled and the back channel was awesome. What was not so awesome is the 3 second delay that I listened to, but with the recordings here I get to back and review them again and again.

It was an awesome 3 days and I can't wait until next year!