What does OCPS's agreement with Google mean?

Apps for Education will now be available to various extents for all OCPS students and staff, which helped OCPS win an award.

By Zak Kerr
| 5:37 p.m. April 12, 2016

Southwest Orange
News

ORANGE COUNTY This month in Boston, Orange County School Board Member Kat Gordon accepted a national Digital School District Survey Award from the Center for Digital Education. This recognized Orange County Public Schools as one of the top 15 large school districts at integrating technology at all levels of district-related work, from classrooms to the board.

“Last year, we were recognized by the same organization but for a digital content achievement award, and that was focused primarily on curriculum work,” OCPS Director of Digital Curriculum and Instructional Design Mariel Milano said. “Adopting … any cloud platform across the entire enterprise at all work locations for administrative, classified and instructional staff is one of those things that made us competitive for this year's award. That's a huge change for a district our size.”

Milano referred to OCPS's agreement with Google to integrate its Apps for Education program across the entire district for staff and students.

“Google Apps for Education was intermittently used by some teachers in the past – we didn't have a district-level agreement with them,” Milano said. “When the pilot program first started three years ago, the first seven schools that we provided laptops for every student at – Ocoee High School being the only high school at that time – used Google Apps for Education, and then after we saw that it was successfully used … we decided it was time as a district to provide access to these resources and really support them at scale.”

Thus, all OCPS students and staff now will have access to all of these Google tools for learning purposes, regardless of whether they have laptops from OCPS. This allows them access to an immersive, collaborative environment more quickly than OCPS can provide students with individual laptops, Milano said.

Google programs available to all students and staff will be Docs, Drawing, Drive, Forms, Sheets and Slides.

WHAT'S IT FOR?

Director of Digital Curriculum and Instructional Design Mariel Milano broke down the usage of each Google application within OCPS.

Gmail is used primarily for correspondence in place of letter writing, and so what looked at what age students usually begin that sort of correspondence as a part of the Florida Standards, (which) recommends keyboarding at the second-grade level in preparation for some sort of standardized testing … so we began the use of email in third grade, when students normally begin to write friendly letters and do things like that and also would have keyboarding skills under their belt ... limited to emailing only other students and faculty members within OCPS.

Google Groups would be used by students as a kind of contained messaging platform. For example, a teacher might post a posed question on a certain topic, and students would in turn reply to it, kind of like a closed news feed. ... Teachers use it in a slightly different way. Some will use it to request tech help from other teachers and get their answers to frequently asked questions.

Google Plus is really a social networking tool very similar to Facebook in some ways, but it has circles, so basically groups of people. The way the district envisions this being used is actually more for teachers in terms of professional learning communities and sharing of professional resources and ideas. In terms of students, it's being able to share academic resources and access collections of resources, like links to articles that teachers might post.

Google Calendar is a really important one. This is one that is replacing student planners, so students use Google Calendar to organize their assignments, to keep track of everyday student activities, to book appointments – schools can activate a feature that allows them to book appointments, like with their guidance counselor – things like that. Teachers can also create a Google calendar and then share it with students, so that they can, for example, post all the due dates for assignments for their class and students would have access to it.

Google Drive is really just their online storage, so this allows students to access their files anytime, anywhere. In the past, one of the challenges would be if your laptop broke and all of your files were stored on your laptop … you would lose your work. So this allows you to have instant access to all your files, even if you have a failure with your laptop, it gets dropped, something happens to it. And it also allows you to access all of your files from a phone, a parent's computer or the library ...The second thing that it's really important for is the file sharing and the active collaboration between students and teachers. They submit many of their assignments through Google Drive and also collaborate on documents with other students to complete group projects.

Google Docs is basically what they use in place of … Microsoft Word. It's just what they use for note-taking every day, report writing, just general document processing. And teachers also do things like produce their lesson plans, create online worksheets, those sorts of things.

Google Slides is typically something students and teachers use to make presentations that are shared with others. It's very common to walk into a classroom and see students using Google Slides to make a presentation on a particular topic they want to share with the class. At West Orange, I observed students creating presentations on characters in “The Odyssey” … You see them working on things in science or social studies, where they're researching different topics and making presentations on them. The district also uses Google Slides to make presentations at large.

Google Sheets is … like an Excel. Students collect data there; they make graphs … Teachers also organize data from assessments they might be doing in class, so they can better get a handle on things.

Google Forms is really interesting, because it can be used almost like a SurveyMonkey. … Schools use it to collect data even in terms of school spirit events. Teachers can use it as an assessment tool, because it has multiple-choice items. Students can use it to survey their peers, like in student government, so it's widely used. Schools can even use it to send surveys to parents, even if they don't have a Google account, so it really gives a lot of connection between the school and the community.

Google Drawing is one of those ones that people don't always use a lot in their personal life. You can actually use it to make a simple drawing, but a lot of teachers use it to make graphic organizers, like a Venn diagram … and then students can share their drawings with each other and add notes at the same time.

Google Sites will be new for us this coming year. It's really a personal website maker, and in the long run, the district hopes students will be able to use it to create independent portfolios of exemplary work that they might be able to share as part of a college application. Your best artwork, your best research papers – all of the things that really speak to you. You can also use it as an interactive notebook. They might divide their page in two, and on the left side of the page put all of the teacher notes, and on the right side of the page link all of the websites and videos and things they found about the same topic to make it a living, interactive page of all the things they're learning.

YouTube will be for creating videos for classroom projects, and teachers will be able to enhance lessons using videos they have created, if they want to.

“Google Apps for Education is unique in that it allows unlimited storage to every teacher and student … of any file type ... which is one of the reasons it's such a great value for the district, because storage is incredibly expensive,” she said. “To provide students that level of production and creativity freedom is terrific for us.”

Moreover, students can transfer their files elsewhere when they leave high school, instead of some formats in which storage is temporary and then obliterated, Milano said.

But this is not unlimited access.

“If I've ever heard a concern about Google, it's always, 'What would happen if my child contacted somebody outside the district?'” Milano said. “Students in elementary and middle school can only use Google to share or collaborate with other students and teachers that are inside the OCPS network. You have to have somebody who has an OCPS in their email address. Students in high school have the same limitations, with the exception of being able to submit college applications, scholarships – things they might need to do for academic purposes – and those are limited … because safety is our No. 1 priority for kids.”

Also, other than the aforementioned programs, students must reach a certain grade before they can use these apps.

Gmail is off limits until third grade; Calendar, Groups and Sites are unavailable until middle school; seventh grade is when Google Plus is allowed; and only high-school students can use YouTube.

“The Children's Internet Protection Act and the Children Online Protection Act require that students 13 and younger have different safeguards for privacy in place,” Milano said. “Google Plus is a form of social media, and in our district … only approved for students over the age of 13, so we decided to make that cutoff in seventh grade … even though it's still limited to use within the district … to that particular age group.”

Parents also have the right within district policy to opt out of social media, she said.

But overall, these technologies could drastically enhance student learning capabilities and put them ahead of the curve when it comes to entering tertiary school or the workforce.

“We're hoping all this will help students be more ready for college and the workplace, where now there's a greater emphasis on collaboration at work than there ever has been, and also that they'll be ready to take on whatever technology is available at their college,” Milano said. “I know when I went to high school, there was a very limited use of technology, but when I came to UCF, there was a lot of technology, and it took me a long time to catch up with those things. I think this will give our students an advantage other districts don't have.”

Contact Zak Kerr at [email protected].