EdTechTeam

Global Network of Educational Technologists

Infrastructure

Kicking off Summer in the Admin Console

Students are out and now is when the magic really happens. Whether it’s processing a year full of Google for Education updates or implementing new initiatives that improve processes for fall: Summer is the time to Get. Things. Done. Let’s kick off the summer in the Admin Console of your Google Domain.

What kind of tasks should you do with your Google Domain during the summer? 

Departing staff accounts

We spend a lot of time thinking about our student roll-over every year, but one thing we often forget is: what do we do with our staff accounts? The best option is to move all of your departing staff into a folder called 2019, underneath your Suspended User OU. That way, in the future, you can easily find accounts that are ready to be deleted once your retention policy allows. 

In fact, we’d highly recommend doing this even if you are not deleting accounts currently! Save future you some headaches by giving yourself this option now. Even better, set up an automation to do this for you saving you the time and hassle. Learn more about optimizing your OU Structure.

Clean your Classroom 

Take this time to clean up your Google Classrooms. Archive classes for your teachers so that when they return they will have a fresh canvas. Don’t worry, this does not delete the classes, and teachers will be able to unarchive them if they wish to reuse some content.  

There are a couple of ways to accomplish this; if you are comfortable with an open source command line tool, you could use GAM. Alternatively you could do this individually in the Classroom API Explorer or in bulk with Little SIS for Classroom. In addition to its Google Classroom insight features, Little SIS for Classroom can be used to perform critical cleanup tasks like identifying and bulk-archiving old, unneeded classes so they don’t clutter up the student and teacher experience.

Hangouts

Another summertime item to think about is transitioning to Hangouts. Summer is a great time to lay the groundwork for converting your users to use Hangouts Chat. As a reminder, Google Hangouts (Classic Hangouts) is going away this October and we are going to be left with two products that replace it. The first is Hangouts Chat, this is going to be the chat replacement, which offers plenty of improvements, such as chat rooms, bot integrations and improved group messaging. The other is Hangouts Meet, this is the new and improved video and web conferencing solution, which is a pretty powerful tool to use and is also free.

Group permissions

You may also recall that Google recently updated how group permissions are defined. The change happened late in the year, so it’s possible that your groups may have been affected. This is very important to review if you utilized any custom roles in your groups as a lot of the settings have been removed or merged into new or existing settings. If you were only utilizing the standard groups such as Owner, Manager or Member, you likely do not have to make changes but it’s still worth a review.

Have a great summer!

No matter what projects, tasks, or reviews you need to do during the summer, don’t forget your Google Environment. The best and worst thing about Google is that it just works. So it’s important to make sure it’s set up to EDU best practices to ensure your Students’ and Staff’s success. 

Andrew Giggey is a Google for Education Consultant for Amplified IT, an education-focused consultancy that brings a unique blend of technical skills and knowledge to the K-12 market to enable and empower IT staff to leverage the innovation of Google for Education and Google Cloud.

Robust Infrastructure and the Role of Efficiency

In a recent keynote I heard a speaker extol the value in letting kids struggle in the learning process. As an educator and parent, I watched my students and children at home struggle with a variety of tasks and can see the benefit of allowing learning to happen organically through the struggle. The challenge I often faced was finding the balance between allowing them to struggle and lending a helping hand to speed up the process.

The value in the struggle must be carefully weighed in light of efficiency. Sometimes it’s just more efficient and beneficial for me to provide direct help to negate the struggle and get the process moving again. That delicate balance is one that teachers experience regularly, especially as it relates to technological tools in the classroom.

Case in point, a teacher approached me with tears in her eyes about 18 months ago. She said in confidence that her administration was encouraging, or perhaps pressuring, teachers to go paperless, and that she did not have a clear direction of what that meant. More importantly for her, she was losing precious time by having to provide feedback on student writing via Google Docs instead of her tried-and-true method of written comments on printed pages. She and I talked more and I could see her frustration as it dripped from every word, but rather than come across as anger I felt a profound sadness. She kept saying over and over again that she was spending less time with her students because it was taking her longer to give them the feedback they so desperately needed.

It’s from that very conversation that I decided to build CheckMark. This tool is designed to help teachers like her gain back those moments and help her be more efficient in her work. This idea of efficiency resonates because when we increase in efficiency in our work, we can experience a net increase in time saved which hopefully correlates to a reduction in stress. As we look at robust infrastructure, I sometimes wonder if we are often adding new tools for the sake of adding new tools, or whether we really consider the nature of efficiency. Perhaps if we begin to look at tools through a lens of efficiency we can help teachers gain back those moments with students—moments that are priceless.

Dr. Christopher Craft is an award-winning educator and speaker based in South Carolina and the Executive Director of Innovation for EdTechTeam. As a classroom teacher, he has been recognized both locally and nationally for innovative teaching with technology. Most recently he won the Belk Service Learning Challenge Grand Prize for his work with 3D-printed prosthetics for children. Dr. Craft was also asked to visit the White House and meet with U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan and Dr. Jill Biden for a dialogue on the current state and future of education. He was named to the National School Board Association’s “20 to Watch” and one of the prestigious “20 under 40” in South Carolina. He has a B.A. in Spanish, a M.Ed in Educational Technology, and a Ph.D. in Educational Psychology and Research from the University of South Carolina, and is Nationally Board Certified. Chris is a Google Certified Innovator, a Google in Education Trainer, and was recently accepted to be an Apple Distinguished Educator. Find out more about Dr. Craft at www.christophercraft.com or follow him on Twitter @crafty184.