I feel like I have taken in so much information that right now I cannot see the wood or the trees, I can't even see the earth they are planted in. There are so many things that I did not know about the facilities that Google provides through its services. For example I was not really a fan of Google Sheets as I liked being able to mail merge etc. with my openoffice application, and when forced to also within Excel. I treated it as a little online brother to a real spreadsheet package.
This is now all out of the window, all this and more is available in Google Spreadsheets, its quite easy to mail merge and then automatically email people from this. (there is something else I wanted to write about sheets but my head is now full of maps)..edit...remembered it....the functions are much easier than other software, they make sense and have been simplified, less clicks and highlighting, easier to create averages makes it easier to analyse data. The data can be seamlessly linked into other presentation forms which leads to cross curriculum teaching in a real world way. We can do a survey or experiment, analyse it in maths and science statistically, look at the data a different way in humanities and geography and present it for business models.
There are so many different ways to use google earth and maps for data analysis, which we can then analyse in spreadsheets, we can do surveys in Google Forms, map them, analyse them with either data or space topics (this is what I did in an old job as a site assessment manager for the Co-op, in an application that cost £1000's with data that cost £10,000's, all for free!)
Right now I feel like I could set up the most powerful marketing company the world has ever seen, without spending a penny, I can see how we can use this for huge projects to teach with. How we can make investigations that are real and will impact on students futures in jobs that have not yet been invented or discovered.
There are Twitter links I sent to different departments at work that already look better than any resource I have ever seen and we have 1:1 Chromebooks at IPACA which makes it all easier to do all of this.
I think I need sleep, I need hours to be created after the sleep before the 'Unconference' tomorrow so I can try to compose my thoughts, I also need to go on a diet. The food today was top class, breakfast was top quality, I overfilled at lunch with the selection on offer, then topped it up at the celebration dinner with what I thought was a snack. This was washed down with very nice wine and a couple of cheeky Glenmorangies with many of the other GTCglers.
For me right now the best part of the day was talking to so many different people from around the world, all with different experiences yet with a common goal, to enrich the lives of anyone who wants to learn more.
I do apologise for the erratic nature of this post, it is a reflection of the day, and I love that method of learning. I can focus on specifics over time. Tomorrow looks to be even better.
Congratulations to all who were there today, I am looking forward to the ideas that will come tomorrow.
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