Google For Education Community Meetup

I attended the first Google For Education Community Meetup today. The event was hosted by Google Malaysia at the KL Sentral Office, which does not look like a conventional office to me.

This two-hour meeting was chaired by En Amir, involving 30+ people, ranging from preschool, primary and secondary teachers to public and private university lecturers (IPG, UPSI, SEGi and Taylor's).

After an hour long of self-introduction of every attendees, groups were formed to generate ideas on professional development (PD) training programs needed by educators in Malaysia for using Google for Education Apps.

I was proposed by other group members to synthesize and present outcomes of the discussion. I classified the outcomes into the TPCK model. Herewith the outcomes:

Contents:
1. Should cover the whole spectrum of education, i.e. early years, primary, secondary, tertiary and lifelong learning.
2. For specific subject matter e.g. Add Maths, learning apps should be made inclusive cover multiple topics to afford active, fun and creative learning activities.

Pedagogy:
1. Pedagogy for personalised and eaningful training experience.

Technology
1. In terms of affordance, post-training and just-in-time support should be made available to trainees.
2. Technological knowledge on using apps should be structured into three levels. The basic level would expose educators to the technologies; the intermediate levl should be demonstrating how to optimize the usage of existing apps, while the advanced level should focus on turning educators into apps developers.

I have shared the following formula to my group members:
Results = Personal Capability x Personal Knowledge x (1+method)(1+tool)

Also, a spider web visualization could be used to determine the types and topics of PD needed by individual trainees.

During the discussion outcome presentation, interesting ideas were suggested by other groups, including:
1. Setting up Google+ community to share teaching materials.
2. Sharing of short video clips, ideally 5 to 10 minutes per clip, like Brainwave Video Selfie on what you did in the class
3. The need for quality control and content curation.
4. Uploading Qs encountered in using the apps.

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My reflection:
I should use Google Apps in my teaching and document success and failure stories.
Training provided should be subject matter specific.