{"id":4064,"date":"2014-06-30T11:51:02","date_gmt":"2014-06-30T10:51:02","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/newsletter.alt.ac.uk\/?p=4064"},"modified":"2015-08-20T11:42:01","modified_gmt":"2015-08-20T10:42:01","slug":"geug14-google-apps-for-education-european-user-group","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/altc.alt.ac.uk\/blog\/2014\/06\/geug14-google-apps-for-education-european-user-group\/","title":{"rendered":"GEUG14: Google Apps for Education European User Group"},"content":{"rendered":"

Last week I was presenting at the Google Apps for Education European User Group<\/a> (GEUG) at the University of York. It was the third time this event has been run and as in previous years was an excellent opportunity for Google Apps for Education users to come together and share some of their experiences. The event is interesting because it attracts both IT staff as well as educators. In fact this year IT related staff outnumbered academic. There was still a strong presence for educators in the programme and here is a summary of some of the the sessions.<\/p>\n

Living in the Cloud: A year with GAFE & Chrome OS, Mathew Collins -University of York<\/h3>\n

The event opened with a great presentation from Matthew Collins highlighting how he uses Google Apps in both teaching and research. There were a number of aspects of Matthew\u2019s presentation I found useful from his use of Google Drive and Sheets to orchestrate large scale research management and data collection across 46 partners to the use of Google+ Communities to support research seminars.<\/p>\n

A Google Drive application Matthew highlighted of interest to researchers is Paperpile<\/a>. This is a reference management application which lets you store papers and articles in your Google Drive. This application is clever because it uses the existing functionality of Drive, in particular, indexing pdf documents even if they are imaged based (this is a feature I\u2019ve been a longer support of in other tools like Evernote). It also integrates with Google Documents providing some very useful citation features.<\/p>\n

Great to meet the #Paperpile<\/a> team at #GEUG14<\/a>. A design philosophy of simplicity & attention to detail; hope we get a site liscence soon!<\/p>\n

\u2014 Matthew Collins (@mc80york) June 24, 2014<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

View video of Living in the Cloud<\/a><\/p>\n

Going Google Nexus 1to1, Simon Thompson \u2013 Leeds Metropolitan University<\/h3>\n

Simon gave an overview of a pilot at Leeds Met University which distributed Google Nexus 7 tablets to students. There has been some recent criticism of these types of schemes and the value to learning. This in part focuses around there limited functionality primarily as a device for consumption rather than production. I think this argument is far from clear cut as it ignores the ability for real time interaction, through voting or other \u2018lite\u2019 interaction (e.g. tweeting), as well as real time research and discovery. This aside Simon raised a number of important points:<\/p>\n