This workshop will explore the potential of the Google Apps for Education suite to create a “Cloud Learning Environment”. Key topics will include:. Institutional scale of adoption and feedback from the recent “guug11” community event. Economic and contractual considerations for cloud services. Disruptive applications of the Google technologies. For institutions that have “Gone Google”, the relationship between Google Apps and the Virtual Learning Environment. Feedback to Google on future directions for the Google Apps suite This will be a highly interactive session, with delegates being encouraged to propose and vote on topics for discussion using the Google Moderator tool. Whilst this will not be a hands-on session per se, delegates will benefit from having a passing familiarity with the Google Apps tools.

Over 10 million students now use Google Apps for Education, the free cloud computing service from Google. William Florance leads on Google Apps for Education in Europe, the Middle East and Africa. Loughborough University migrated 17,000 students to Google Apps in December 2009 with near universal take-up of Google Calendar, and two thirds of students using Google Docs for collaboration. Over 5,000 former students have used Loughborough’s ground breaking Google service for alumni – effectively a user driven e-Portfolio. Martin Hamilton led this project and also organized the Google Apps for Education UK User Group (“guug11”) community event in February 2011. Mark Allen from Ed in the Clouds has used Google Apps to build collaborative learning environments for around 12,000 school children, some as young as four. Even before they can write, pupils can be publishing material to the web and submitting their work for peer review, and yet the tools also need to be accessible and intuitive to the most techno-phobic schoolteacher.

Through attending the workshop, which will include considerable discussion after a brief introduction, delegates will develop a deeper understanding of: institutional considerations that may apply where cloud services are concerned: educational applications of the Google Apps suite ranging from schools to Universities: areas where Google Apps offers a radically different proposition to conventional institutional IT systems; working with Google.