Some early Google for Education Lessons

I'm pretty sure the last time I used Blogger, the year started with a 1. My past blogging efforts have usually been in one WordPress or another, but given that I wanted a blog to help document the journey towards "going Google" at school, I figured this was the only real option. This or doing it with a Google Site - which just doesn't quite feel "bloggy" enough to me. 
Second semester this year (Australian timetable: June to Dec) our school is running a trial, primarily of Google Classroom, and there have been a few little surprises along the way that might be worth knowing for anyone else who is embarking on signing up for the Google Education Suite.

Lesson 1 - Get the sign-up process running well before you need to use it

The sign-up process feels like it's just going to happen, but once you sign up there's a massive wait for Google to authenticate that you're a school.  They give you a 20 day trial, during which you can only have 10 users. This was a useful time, but given that our top priority was to try and get user synchronisation happening, it was a bit frustrating. Just budget plenty of time. 

Lesson 2 - The Google Cloud Directory Sync is a bit buggy

I went into see our IT Technician, armed with links to Google Documentation, and confident that surely this thing had to work and we'd get users synched up before I went to lunch. But it wasn't quite like that. There were little teething issues all over the place and saving configuration files wouldn't always hold from one time to another. It works, and it's a pretty good solution for getting students and staff into the system. But I had super-high expectations of Google, and was let down a little bit.

Lesson 3 - Get in, play and take every opportunity to show stuff off

For us it's been Google Classroom that has been the driving force in getting the school signed up to the Google Suite, and while I knew I was excited about what we could do, years of trying to get teachers excited about different tech has taught me that I'll usually need to work pretty hard to have others see the benefits. But instead the experience has been teachers seeing it, starting to believe they might even be able to have a bash at doing it themselves, and really starting to see some opportunities for their classes. Similarly, the familiarity of the Google environment for students has meant that they are quickly getting onto the system and feel comfortable with really minimal explanation. 

So the challenge is to get it out there. I used a Google Drawing quite hesitantly the other day as a planning tool in a meeting and it went off. Anyone and everyone wants a look at my Google Classroom.

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