Posted by Andrew Caffrey, Assistant Headteacher at Streetly Academy

Editor's note: Today’s post comes from Andrew Caffrey, assistant headteacher for data and technologies at The Streetly Academy in Sutton Coldfield, United Kingdom. Caffrey, a passionate supporter of technology in classrooms, recently received the Inspirational Educator Award by the Worshipful Company of Educators. We invited him to talk about the value of ebooks in encouraging students to read.

As a teacher, I know what a gift reading can be — we all wish we had more time to tackle the books on our own lists — but not all of my students feel the same way. It can be an uphill battle to convince students that books will open up new worlds. Every day at Streetly Academy, we brainstorm ways to encourage students to find and read what they love.

To start, we set aside dedicated reading time for students so they learn the value of this fundamental skill. Reading time is scheduled into the school day, just like any other subject, which telegraphs its importance for students. During these sessions, some students bring in books from home, and some read them on their Chromebooks, which use the RM Books system so we can offer as many different titles as possible. For students who are resistant to reading, variety matters. These students often believe there’s nothing out there that they’ll enjoy, so access to different genres and topics can help pique their interest.

We’ve also noticed that reluctant readers will warm up to books on screen, since students are used to devices at home and in school. Research backs up our observation: a recent study from the UK’s National Literacy Trust found that boys in particular become more avid and confident readers when they have access to ebooks.

“A lot of students, normally boys, consider reading boring and don’t even want to attempt it,” says Rebecca Leeson, an English teacher at our school. She’s seen the difference that ebooks can make with both boys and girls, as well as changing student thinking about how a “book” is defined. For example, Rebecca gives students excerpts from longer books.

Students at Streetly Academy have enjoyed the greater choice that reading with ebooks has brought them

“Students often think that reading must always involve a novel,” Rebecca told me. “The extracts give them the opportunity to look at a range of texts instead of focusing on just one. Sometimes they’re the beginnings of novels, but can also be nonfiction. A lot of students then go on to read the full texts for the subjects they enjoy.”

Greater choice of reading material is key to encouraging students to read more. Now that RM Books can be used with Google Classroom, we can select and share books even more easily with our students. We can also highlight the pages that we want to students to read so they know exactly how much reading to complete.

Along with offering students a wider range of reading choices, we also experiment with different ways to read. Rebecca, for instance, switches her teaching format depending on how students respond to a reading selection. In addition to giving students independent reading time, she’ll gauge whether small groups or a whole-class session would be more appropriate for a discussion. If students are struggling with a text, she might introduce an audio book option, or suggest that students read short articles on a subject before they move on to the full versions.

It’s heartening to see more students change their attitudes toward reading, and in some cases, to really embrace literature. One of Rebecca’s students started the school year with little interest in reading. After several months of reading short texts and discovering subjects she enjoyed, she grew so confident that she won the English award. Another reader on her way to a lifetime of discovering books!

Posted by Melissa Horwitz, Marketing Manager, Google for Education

Editor's note: Teachers are uniquely inspiring people. It takes a teacher to innovate in the classroom and inspire a love for learning. We had a great time celebrating these everyday heroes at ISTE this week, and we wanted to highlight a few of them below. Check out the #GoogleEdu and #ISTE2016 hashtags to get a recap of what went on in Denver this week.

The teachers at Laguna Beach Unified School District in California and Sun Prairie Area School District in Wisconsin wanted to give their traditional classroom a reboot. By upending the typical classroom layout that confines students to desks and teachers to the front of the room, they increased student engagement, introducing technology, hands-on learning and group activities.

Laguna Beach designs learning spaces to enhance engagement through movement 

“The classroom is the most neglected element in education right now,” says Mike Morrison, chief technology officer at Laguna Beach Unified School District. “You’ll find rooms with dark projectors, the lights out and the blinds drawn. How could these dark spaces inspire learning?” At Laguna Beach, Morrison and 15 teachers plunged into research on the impact that environment has on the senses — and tested technologies, furniture and even colored lighting. The core elements, says Morrison, boiled down to flexible furniture, multiple monitors and audio amplification.

To replace bulky desks that were designed decades ago to be placed in rows, Morrison and his team chose desks and chairs with wheels that can revolve in any direction. This frees up teachers and students to quickly group desks together and direct attention at any part of the classroom — or at each other. There are standing desks as well, giving students the option to have their legs engaged — a boon for students dealing with attention-deficit disorders, Morrison says.

More monitors and whiteboards provide more space for students to work as teams, instead of just watching the teacher up front. “The walls can then become anything we want them to be,” says Morrison — a place for a test review, a team project or solving a math problem as a class.

Morrison and his team also changed the audio and lighting to help set the mood for different types of learning and make it easier for teachers to be heard. Teachers wear lanyard microphones connected to each classroom’s speaker system. “A teacher who spends the day shouting to be heard is stressed, and so is the class,” Morrison says. Teachers use lighting to change wall colors depending on the activity — yellow to encourage quiet reading time, blue for creativity and brainstorming.

About 40 classrooms have been reconfigured to date, with 20 more to come this summer — and the change is palpable, Morrison says. “Teachers are walking around more, and they’re in touch with what students are doing,” Morrison says. “The atmosphere in classrooms is also much calmer.” 

Laguna Beach Unified School district put together this fun video — a takeoff on TV’s “The Office” — showing off the classroom improvements.

Classrooms become technology incubators for Sun Prairie Area students 

At Sun Prairie Area School District, teachers are inspiring students to be entrepreneurial and engage with technology. They found that by creating dedicated spaces without any of the usual trappings of a classroom, they could motivate students to break out of their comfort zones and think more outside the box.

One of these learning spaces, “Fab Lab,” was created by Stephanie Breunig, a media specialist for the district’s Cardinal Heights Upper Middle School. Students can use the Fab Lab for school or personal projects. The lab has Legos, digital and GoPro cameras, art supplies, circuit boards and software such as GarageBand, recording software for music and Final Cut Pro, a video editing software. In the Fab Lab, students work with teachers to create their own videos or music mashups and internet memes. They've even started learning 3D printing and robotics.

Student working on a project in the Fab Lab

At Sun Prairie Area, teachers are also evolving learning spaces inside the classroom. With Google Maps, students take virtual tours of the world in their geography lessons, learning details about other cultures that they couldn’t find on a regular map. “Students use Google Maps to explore and take interactive tours of other countries,” says Tim Mortensen, 6th and 7th grade social studies teacher at Patrick Marsh Middle School. “When we learned about the pyramids, they could actually see them on the map and they started asking questions about what they’re made of. Some students even explored the surrounding area, wanting to know more about the hotels and restaurants in Egypt and asking questions like why the McDonalds there has different items on the menu.”

“Literacy no longer means just reading and writing words on a page. Technology has created a new definition of literacy that includes digital,” says Curt Mould, director of innovation, assessment and continuous improvement at Sun Prairie Area School District. To teach with technology, teachers are creating learning spaces defined by interactive learning and experimentation.

Laguna Beach and Sun Prairie Area School Districts have discovered just a few of the ways that disrupting the traditional classroom environment can help engage students. From exploring the world with online activities, to simply taking the classroom outside for a lesson, there are an infinite number of ways that teachers all over are creating new learning spaces to inspire students. Is your school district trying to reinvent the rooms where learning happens? Tell us about your plans to inspire curiosity in the classroom environment.

Posted by Alex Lockwood, Software Engineer, Google Expeditions

Editor's note: Teachers are uniquely inspiring people. It takes a teacher to engage students, bring the classroom alive and turn classroom concepts into lifelong passions. This week at ISTE, we announced four new ways for these everyday heroes to engage their classes using Google tools. One of these announcements was that Expeditions — virtual reality field trips using Cardboard — is now available to everyone. To get started, all teachers need to do is download the Expeditions app onto a set of devices and choose where in the world they want to take their class. The app is available today for Android and will be available for iPhones and iPads soon.

Field trips and school outings create opportunities for students to share new experiences and get them excited about learning, but teachers often lack the resources for these out-of-the-classroom adventures.. Teachers at Community Consolidated School District 62 wouldn’t let a lack of resources stop them from igniting students’ sense of wonder by exploring the world together. Sarah Murphy, a science teacher at Algonquin Middle School; Elizabeth Moravec, an art teacher at Terrace Elementary School and Orchard Place Elementary School; and Matt Peebles, a fourth-grade teacher at Plainfield Elementary School introduced Google Expeditions. Expeditions are collections of virtual reality panoramas — 360° photo spheres and 3D images — annotated with details, points of interest and questions that make them easy to integrate into curriculum already used in schools.

Many students at CCSD 62 come from low-income families and may have never traveled outside of their community. But with Expeditions, teachers can take these students on trips of a lifetime and make lesson plans more interactive and meaningful. Teachers at CCSD 62 can apply to use the district’s “traveling suitcase” with all the tools and technology to take students on an Expedition. Read how Sarah, Elizabeth and Matt are encouraging students to become curious learners and establish deeper connections with their surroundings.

Encouraging students to ask more questions and take charge of their learning 

Since Sarah got an Expeditions kit for her classroom, her students have developed a new love of learning about science. In the past it was difficult for students to visualize the concepts they learned, such as how big a geographical landmark is. Now that Expeditions is an integral part of every unit, or themed area of focus, students have been more engaged and are asking more in-depth questions that show a deeper understanding of the topics.

For example, Sarah first took her students to the Grand Canyon to show them the processes that formed one of the seven wonders of the world when they were studying Earth History. When they put on Google Cardboard, students started becoming curious about new aspects of the landmark and asked questions like “How did it form?” and “What do the stripes mean?”.

“Students’ faces lit up when they saw the size of the Grand Canyon,” Sarah says. “By virtually traveling there, they better understood that the stripes are different layers of rock. Expeditions encourage students to observe, explore and be curious. For them to be successful in life, they need to be curious and be able to explore on their own.”

Students in Sarah's class look through Google Cardboard, engaging with the "Into the stratosphere" Expedition

Sarah also encourages students to discover their passion for learning and science by letting them lead Expeditions. When students lead instead of the teacher, they ask each other different types of questions, sparking meaningful conversations. They’re also sharing their knowledge after exploring diverse ecosystems in small groups. For example, a group of students studying the desert shared what they learned during Expeditions with students focusing on the rainforest, and vice versa. This personalized learning and peer-to-peer sharing encourages students to be active learners and take ownership of their education.

Inspiring students to approach art with a new lens

In her art classes, Elizabeth often shows students photos of art, sculptures and monuments to inspire their own creations, but when she had the opportunity to use Google Expeditions, she knew she could provide them with a “larger than life” source of inspiration. Elizabeth chose the Colosseum Expedition, which fit nicely into the current unit about monuments.

“Expeditions aid in creativity,” Elizabeth says. “Students are thinking about their surroundings and the impact they have on their environment.”

Since Elizabeth doesn’t have an Expeditions kit permanently in her classroom like Sarah, she’s found creative ways to recreate the virtual reality experience using Google Street View and YouTube 360 videos. With Elizabeth’s DIY virtual reality, students experienced driving across the Golden Gate Bridge in an Indie 500 car. Others went to the top of the Space Needle and said it felt like they were free birds soaring above the world. After these experiences, which many students couldn’t imagine doing in real life, students added more detail to their drawings, analyzed their work more and made deeper connections when thinking about how objects relate to the world. By using virtual reality-like experiences, Elizabeth is giving students a new source of inspiration for their art and more insights and tools to express their thoughts and reflections.

Artwork students created after "visiting" various locations using Google Street View and YouTube 360 videos

Applying classroom concepts to real-world situations 

Math concepts can be abstract, and while students may see its application to calculating a tip at a restaurant or measuring ingredients in the kitchen, they might not always see the more fun uses. Matt uses Expeditions to explore landmarks and show fourth grade students how math concepts, specifically geometry, can be useful beyond the classrooms. When his students embarked on the Great Wall of China Expedition, he taught them how right angles contribute to the stability and construction of structures. After that visit, the entire unit was more impactful because students connected the math concepts to their Expeditions experience.

Matt's students look through the viewmaster to experience what it's like visiting The Great Wall of China

When they saw how math can help a monumental structure last so long, students began to wonder about the architectural design and math concepts behind other buildings and monuments. Just as Elizabeth does, Matt takes his students on additional virtual reality trips by using Google Street View. His students “walked around” 16th Street Baptist Church and talked about the location’s significance and its role in U.S. history.

“Incorporating technology and Google Expeditions in the lesson plan creates intrinsic motivation, and students feed off each others’ enthusiasm,” Matt says. “When learning becomes fun, students make new connections and can’t wait to explore the next thing.”

Sarah, Elizabeth and Matt are creating field trip-like experiences for their students to inspire them to think more creatively, “travel” around the world and find greater meaning for classroom lessons as they pertain to real life. Earlier this week, we announced that Expeditions is available to everyone. To get started, all teachers need to do is download the Expeditions app onto a set of devices and choose where in the world they want to take their class. The app is available today for Android and will be available for iPhones and iPads soon.

Posted by Joao Wilbert, Creative Lead and Zebedee Pedersen, Creative Technologist, Google Creative Lab

When we were kids, physical things like toys and blocks helped us learn—inspiring curiosity and imagination in a fun, playful way. We think there’s no reason that shouldn’t also be possible when it comes to Computer Science.

When kids learn to code, they’re not just learning how to program computers, they’re learning a new language for creative expression and developing computational thinking: a skillset that will help prepare them to solve all kinds of problems. Making code physical — known as tangible programming — offers a unique way to combine the way children innately play and learn with computational thinking.

Earlier this week we announced a new research initiative called Project Bloks. The project is a collaboration between Google, IDEO and Stanford’s Paulo Blikstein, inspired by — and building upon — a long history of educational theory and research in the field of tangible programming.

The ultimate goal of Project Bloks is to create an open hardware platform for physical programming experiences to help kids develop computational thinking through play. By creating an open platform, Project Bloks will allow designers, developers and researchers to focus on innovating, experimenting and creating new ways to help kids develop computational thinking. Our vision is that, one day, the Project Bloks platform could become for tangible programming what Blockly is for on-screen programming.

As a first step, we’ve created a system for physical programming and built a working prototype with it. We’re sharing our progress before conducting more research over the summer to inform what comes next.

Want to get involved?
We are currently looking for participants (educators, developers, parents and researchers) from across the globe who are interested in helping shape the future of Computer Science education by remotely taking part in our research studies later in the year. If you would like to be part of our research study or simply receive updates on the project, please sign up here.

For more detailed information about the technology behind Project Bloks, check out our recent post on the Google Research Blog and our position paper. And to learn more about our other initiatives aimed at driving CS education forward and helping kids develop computational thinking skills, check out programs like CS First and Made with Code; and tools like Coding with Chrome, Blockly and Pencil Code.

Posted by Tynia Yang, Software Engineer, Google Forms

Editor's note: On Monday, we announced four new ways to help teachers engage their classes using Google tools. In this post, we’ll dive deeper into one of these tools: Quizzes in Google Forms . If you are at ISTE in Denver, visit us at booth #2511 in the expo hall to learn more and demo our new tools.

Educators have told us that collecting feedback earlier in the learning process results in better outcomes for both teachers and students. But they’ve also shared that creating assessments and providing feedback can lead to hours of repetitive grading.

Dr. Ismael Piedra, a professor at the Instituto Technologico de Monterrey, for example, used “exit tickets” after his lectures to check student comprehension. But his attempts at gathering quick feedback would often result in 300 quizzes to grade and hours of work.

After months of pilots with educators like Dr. Piedra, we launched Quizzes in Google Forms on Monday to help teachers quickly create, deliver and grade assignments or assessments. With Quizzes, teachers can select correct answers for multiple choice and checkbox questions to reduce repetitive grading. They can also enter explanations and review materials to help students learn. And to make sure students understand the lesson material, teachers can prevent students from sending themselves a copy of their responses.

Nick Marchese, a music and programming teacher at the Berkeley Carroll School in Brooklyn, uses Quizzes in Google Forms to adapt his teaching throughout the learning process. “Quizzes help me optimize my teaching,” he explains. “After students take a quiz, I can check the summary of responses to see frequently missed questions and a visual representation of student scores. If I see there’s a question that a lot of students got wrong, then we start the next class by reviewing it.” Nick says that students love the immediate feedback they get while he loves how Quizzes can “automatically check multiple-choice questions and reduce time devoted to grading.”

Effie Kleinberg of Bnei Akiva Schools in Toronto, likes that Quizzes reduce the overhead of giving formative assessments. “Quizzes make it quick and easy to create and grade a student assessment,” he says. Effie posts his Quizzes as assignments in Google Classroom, where he is easily able to keep track of student responses and view results. Students receive quick, actionable feedback though explanations and review materials, without requiring Effie to manually grade each quiz.

We made Quizzes available to all Google Forms users so we can continue improving based on your feedback. Tasks like automating repetitive grading are just the beginning, so we look forward to hearing what you think. Get started by creating your first Quiz today!

Posted by Max Kirsch, Product Manager, Cast for Education

Editor's note: Yesterday we announced four new ways to help teachers engage their classes using Google educational tools. This post dives deeper into one of the those announcements: Cast for Education. If you’re at ISTE in Denver, visit us at booth #2511 in the expo hall to come check it out in person.

In his 11 years of teaching at Hillcrest Elementary in the Lake Stevens School district in Washington State, Bob Coleman has witnessed how educational technology can help advance collaboration and engagement in the classroom. So when the 4th grade teacher found his students stuck on a common math problem, he gathered the class in front of the classroom projector. Sitting behind his desk — now in front of his students and not among them — Mr. Coleman realized that the biggest screen in the room was only available to the teacher.

In Mr. Coleman’s classroom — and for millions of students around the world — both education and technology are expected to be collaborative. But today, the classroom projector is most often out of reach for students. Educators are eager to overcome this barrier, so much so that wireless screen sharing for schools was one of the top features requested by teachers in 2015.
Teachers, we heard you loud and clear. Yesterday we announced Google Cast for Education, a free Chrome app that allows students and teachers to share their screens wirelessly from anywhere in the classroom. Cast for Education carries video and audio across complex school networks, has built-in controls for teachers, and works seamlessly with Google Classroom. And because the app runs on the teacher’s computer that’s connected to the projector, it doesn’t require new hardware. Teachers run the Cast for Education app, and students share their screens through the Cast feature in Chrome.

Teacher view (click image to see larger)

Student view (click image to see larger)

To gather feedback on the product, we had teachers like Mr. Coleman and his colleague Tony Koumaros pilot Cast for Education in their classrooms. Mr. Koumaros knew his students would be excited to share their work with the rest of the class, but he was surprised to discover that they were eager to share even when they didn’t know all of the answers. “Casting makes it fun to ask for help,” he said. “My students enjoyed working through challenges together.”

Erin Turnbach, a 2nd grade teacher who piloted Cast for Education at Tom’s River Regional School District in New Jersey, found herself “co-teaching with a 2nd grader” during a lesson on animals. When the class got stuck during research time, Ms. Turnbach was able to work one-on-one with a student while another casted to the rest of the class. “We’re always trying to encourage teamwork,” Ms Turnbach says. “The end product is stronger when you collaborate and build off each other’s ideas. With Cast for Education, everyone engages and the students take ownership of their learning.”

“It’s hard to imagine not using it now that we have it”, Mr. Coleman says. “Sharing student screens was a big need for us, and now Cast for Education is our daily classroom tool.”

*Note: Visit g.co/CastForEDU to try Cast for Education today in beta, with full availability for Back to School 2016. Chrome management admins can install the new Cast for Education app for all teachers, and the Google Cast extension for their entire domain.

Posted by Karen Greenleaf and Jenny Tolan, Chromebooks for Education team

Editor's note: Earlier today we announced four new ways to help teachers engage their students using Google tools. This post dives deeper into one of the four announcements: creative apps on Chromebooks. If you’re at ISTE in Denver, visit us at booth #2511 in the expo hall to learn more and demo these apps.

Skills of the future 
In 2015, Google commissioned research from the Economist Intelligence Unit to better understand the skills students need to be successful in the future workplace. In addition to literacy and numeracy, the research uncovered a wider range of skills — including problem-solving, teamwork, communication and creativity — that are most sought after by employers.

“It’s increasingly rare for someone to sit in the office with the door closed and do tasks individually,” says Kaitlyn Manchester, ELA Teacher at Muller Road Middle School in Blythewood, South Carolina. “There’s a need to come together as a team to get something done. If you leave school and you don’t have these skills, it’s difficult to do your job in the modern workplace.”

Creative apps on Chromebooks
With this inspiration in mind, we’re on a mission to discover Chromebook tools that can be seamlessly integrated into classroom life, while also fostering skills of the future. We reached out to teachers in Chromebook classrooms and collaborated with EdTechTeacher to identify Chromebook apps that nurture these skills. Three creative apps consistently bubbled up as loved by teachers and students alike: Explain Everything, Soundtrap and WeVideo.

To see these apps in action in the classroom, we visited Muller Road Middle School in Blythewood, South Carolina:
During our visit, students used WeVideo’s collaborative video creation tool in English Language Arts to edit documentaries about a flood that ravaged their town. In Science, they used Soundtrap’s spoken word and music-making platform to create public service announcements about how hand-washing kills germs. And in Math, they used Explain Everything’s interactive whiteboard to animate their thinking about histograms.

“With creative apps on Chromebooks, students bring ideas to the table I never thought of,” says Tryphena Cuffy, 6th grade science teacher at Muller Road. “They are not limited; they combine concrete and abstract thought, and that’s when they shine.”

Finding student voice
A classroom that nurtures creativity often results in students taking different approaches to interacting with the same curriculum. “There are some students who are happy to express themselves verbally. There are others who prefer to write. There are students who don't like to have their face shown, but they’re more than happy to explain their ideas. With these apps, you can help everyone focus on their strengths,” says Bailey Triplett, Muller Road’s AVID Teacher.

Tom Cranmer, Chief Technology Officer at Richland Two School District confirms, “Students want to work with digital content. They want to create. They want to pull in multimedia resources that they can use to create their world and create their stories. This helps them take ownership of their learning and keep them engaged throughout.”

Good things come in threes
To make these creative apps on Chromebooks more accessible to a wider range of school districts, we worked closely with our Chromebook partners to create a special price when all three apps are purchased as a bundle. They may be purchased alongside Chromebooks or on their own, and they are available as an annual subscription per license from Chromebook resellers in the US.

And we’re just getting started. We look forward to working with teachers and partners to bring even more 21st century tools into the classroom.

To learn more about these apps, visit g.co/educhromebookapps, check out the apps’ websites, or contact your school’s Chromebook reseller.