Only just now getting around to posting about the Google Docs Seminar that took place last Saturday.

This was an amazing success with over 100 Hong Kong Teachers giving up their Saturday morning to come along and hear how they might use Google with their students!

I am not really sure why it was so successful when things like workshops for international educators coming to Hong Kong are almost impossible to arrange on a collective level. Could it be the name “Google”, the timing of the event in terms of being too early for exams and reports, the venue of HKU adding credibility or even the fact that it was a free event and included a good morning tea? Whatever the reason, it appealed to the collective masses who turned up in droves with only around 35 of those who registered were “no shows”.

I was very happy to work with Google on getting teachers along to this event and was very pleased to meet many teachers on my mailing list that I had not met F2F.

Here are some notes that I took at the seminar which I think was really well done as it was on a level that seemed to offer something for everyone.

At the Google Docs seminar at HKU. Great turn up of teachers in Hong Kong.

A presentation is apparently available online. Will have to get the reference URL. (later found to be http://sites.google.com/site/hkeduseminar)

The presenter, Min Li is using an account of hongkongteach@gmail.com Doing a good job of showing the Google Docs sharing. Showing a collaborative Essay being written between 2 students.

Covering File revisions so that you can see who said what when. Also now talking about importing files. There is a limit of 500 KB for files uploaded to Google Docs. The presenter showed how to “strip” a file (manually) to fit the doc. One of the participants shared that presentations on google Docs can be up to 10 MB.

There is a lot of control over the people who can edit the doc. You can force them to have to sign into google to edit.

There are some cool gadgets available. Showed the Heatmap gadget on the spreadsheet. Really Cool!!

Moved on to show how to use a Google survey form. Kids can enter data right into the email form and then it collects on a spreadsheet. Apparently it automatically shows a webpage showing a response but I did not get this when registering nor did many other respondees for this workshop.

Min Li is now discussing using Google presentations. Showing how you can collaborate. This mainly featured chatting about slides

The next presenter, Jason Chuck, is now doing Google Earth. He is showing some great stuff viewable in the layers section. Great! (At this point I was fairly “hands on” and did not take many more notes)

Now showing some really good ideas for using the google sites for building fully enabled web sites. Very easy to set up and use!

So, as you can see, there was a lot of good material covered and I felt that most, if not all teachers saw it as a morning well spent.