by David E. Lloyd
For the last 14 years, I have enjoyed working on what some refer to as the “frontlines of tomorrow’s education.” Most educational conferences are becoming more and more focused on online learning and concepts like MOOCs and social education. As educators we are continually faced with the question, how can these concepts work with our current education model?
We are often asked to teach larger classes for less money and fewer resources. The Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) concept has our educational leaders in a frantic race to be the first to find a way to make it work. Leaders in the field have encouraged online administrators and instructors to meet the students where they live by using Facebook, Twitter, and other platforms which inhabit the social realm. Recently, the University of West Georgia has made the transition to Google Apps for Education in order to increase the collaborative nature of our classrooms.
Google Apps for Education allows educators to tap into social learning and online collaboration with their students and colleagues. Google brings far more than Gmail and Google Calendar. It also provides a whole suite of other extremely useful tools for instructional enhancement like Google Drive, Google Hangouts, and Google Voice, to name a few. These new Google resources may be one way that we can successfully do more with less.
David Lloyd is the faculty development coordinator and emerging technologies specialist for UWG Online.
