Course Description
EDUC 439/639: Google Workspace
Conceptual overview with hands-on tutorials for harnessing the educational potential of Google Workspace. Explores the widespread adoption of Google Workspace in schools and explains the business strategy behind Google's decision to make it freely available to schools and non-profit organizations. Identifies learning principles that guide the effective use of Google Workplace to create learning environments that improve educational communication. Demonstrates how to get a free Google Workspace domain to learn how to do these things. The course begins by teaching participants how how to create a Google Workspace domain for your school or workplace. Second, you set up messaging apps that enable educators to communicate via email, chat, and shared calendaring. Third, you configure collaboration apps that empower teachers to engage students who use Google Docs and Sites to demonstrate what they are learning. Fourth, you learn how to add to your domain Google apps that enable users to blog, create photo albums, and enhance their professional development. Finally, participants discover the Google Workspace Marketplace from which you can obtain additional apps including learning management systems that use multimedia and social networking to establish authentic contexts for learning.
Course Modules
This course is organized into a series of modules that are presented to you via the Web. The modules are attached to a collabsible menu that organizes the modules in roughly the same order in which they will be discussed in class. You need not complete these modules in this prescribed order, however. Rather, you can work through the course at your own pace, skipping modules that do not interest you, and spending more time on those that do.
Assignments
Your grade in this course will be based on your performance on a series of assignments that appear on this online syllabus. At any time, you can view the assignments. This list of assignments provides you with a snapshot of what you need to do in this course. All the rest is optional. It is totally up to you how much of the other material you will want to complete. Your instructor will help guide you, depending on the topics you choose to pursue.
Grading
You will receive grades on three kinds of activities. First, there are communication assignments that involve you in online discussions with your fellow classmates and your instructor. Second, you will blog about your thoughts and experiences as you explore the G Suite technologies and resources presented in this course. Third, you will create a Google project site at which you articulate your plan for deploying Google Workspace and explain how your targeted school or workplace will benefit from the use of Google Apps including email, calendaring, document sharing, instant messaging, and Google Sites tools and gadgets. These three parts of the course each constitute a third of your final grade.
Authoring Tools
The recommended authoring tool for use in this course is Google Sites, for which your course instructor has created a series of just-in-time videos that enable you to learn how to create effective Web sites using Google's tools. The videos are called "just-in-time" because you can view them any time of the day or night, whenever you need them for initial instruction or to review the procedures for doing something. The videos cover authoring concepts and strategies that you can learn as you need them.
