GEG Communities

Issue No. 69 | Date: July 28, 2021

Local Success Stories from GEG

Please submit your articles here bit.ly/GEGarticle . We love to hear your stories.

We appreciate all the hard work you continue to do while we head towards the end of a difficult academic year.

Help us to help you promote your events and good work by tagging @GEGProgram on all tweets you make about events or feedback you get from members. We love to join in your celebrations and share your good work.

Keep Googling, keep smiling, keep safe.

GEG Student Ambassador Final Showcase

A 10 week long virtual student exchange program was successfully co-led by Sagun Dhungana GEG Kathmandu, Nepal and Judy Kim GEG Gyeonggi, Korea with more than 200 students from 6 elementary schools and 20+ mentors from Korea and Nepal.

This program was to make people aware of cultural diversity, create empathy amongst the students without borders, practice digital leadership amongst the young generation and let them know that the world is not that far with the right tools in their hands. Each week the students in both countries were taught, mentored and coached performing activities using Google Docs, Google Slides. Google Sites and more digital tools like Flipgrid, Screencastify, Mote and Jamboard. They created interactive and amazing content to showcase their digital fluency and English improvement.

Google Workspace and other applications made it possible for the students to work for more than 12 hours on 7 different assignments and activities including a midpoint and a final checkup presentation. This program has sought a high enthusiasm, empowered students toward global empathy and to gain confidence in speaking, learning as well as presenting.

The program ran from the first week of April, 2021 to the last week of June, 2021 and had been conducted purely online using Google MEET. As well the final showcase was broadcast live for the public to view. We too are ready with planning the next phase of the student ambassador program throughout Asia Pacific in coming days.

GEG Student Ambassador Final Showcase Live Streaming Link : https://youtu.be/yY8eM0pBWsk

GEG Student Ambassador GEG APAC Connect 4.0 Live Streaming Link : https://youtu.be/hZ0qC6aqmok

GEG Leadership

Leading your GEGs

Spotlight on a GEG leader : Sameeha Jhan

This month’s spotlight is all about Sameeha Jhan who is the leader of GEG Colombo in Sri Lanka. As a Co-Leader, Sameeha plans and organises training and development sessions for the GEG and other educators near them.

How did you get involve with Google Educator Groups
We are the first local GEG from our country, Sri Lanka; so there was no connecting with any other. After being introduced to the Google Educator and Trainer certifications in June 2020 by Mr. Azim Majeed - @EduTechOne (the founder of GEG Colombo), I managed to complete Levels 1 and 2; thereafter got my trainer status by early September 2020. We then initiated the GEG Colombo.

What is your most memorable GEG moment?

Just before we were nominated officially for the GEG Colombo, I had a meeting with all three mentors of GEG APAC. Being more of an introvert I had agreed to meet and I was super nervous hours before the meeting! 😶 Nevertheless, I enjoyed the whole discussion right from the start to the end.

What is your favourite thing about being a GEG leader?

The Reach 😀. Enjoying every moment of reaching out to gain new knowledge, reaching out to share the knowledge and enhance skills, both mine and others’. The other would be the Twitter platform. It has definitely been the mediator to connect and collaborate with various platforms, ideas and personnel.

What do you feel you have personally gained from your involvement?

The first thing that comes to my mind is, it helped me step out of my comfort zone. This whole experience has pushed me beyond what I could have imagined for myself.

Tell me something that you learnt in the last month.

There has been quite a lot of SDL (Self-Directed Learning) done over the past month, as every moment is an opportunity to learn something new. The most recent learning outcome would be the Google Data Studio and completed the EdTechTeam “Google Data Studio” Course.

What event that you have coming up excites you?

Plans are on for a 4 week intensive training on Google Classroom. The plan includes activities that will allow Educators to get a hands-on exposure of what it is like to be both an Educator and a Student on this platform. Educators are to get the feel of being students😉, so that excites me 🤞🏼

Before you go, do you have any advice for anyone thinking of becoming a GEG leader?

Don’t think, get started as you will not regret it! 🙃 Being a leader will expose you to loads of opportunities and skill enhancement out there. Not to mention, it is indeed a great opportunity for personal and professional development.

Why not follow @binth_j and @GEG_SriLanka to see how their GEG grows.

GEG Events

Bring your community together to collaborate

Anywhere School Parties GEG Italia and Spain

EG Italia - hosted a viewing party for the Anywhere School, which was live streamed into Italian. Also, GEG Leader Filomena was one of the speakers during the event.

GEG Spain also hosted a viewing party for the Anywhere School, which was live streamed into Spanish.

Code with "Gente de Palmo e Meio"

Code is intended to be a contribution to the development of skills associated with digital literacy and to foster cross-curricular competences. The concepts associated with it should reinforce not only the domain of computing, but also key concepts in other domains of learning (expression, music, art, etc.). It is important to make learning increasingly meaningful and contextualised, challenging students to develop transversal skills, reinforcing confidence in their abilities. Based on these aspects, an activity using tablets was designed and carried out with 5-year-old preschool students at Castiis, Colégio de Santa Eulália. Coding in an educational context allows us to diversify learning scenarios by bringing together programming languages and making a "bridge" with everyday situations, promoting the resolution of problems that encourage the development of logical reasoning, articulation with the areas curricular, carrying out contextualised projects that as a whole provide the student with the opportunity to build their own knowledge.

GEG Learn

Individual professional development opportunities

Google Guardians: Free Google Training for Parents and Guardians

Nikki Lavergne is launching her #VIA20 Innovator project - Google Guardians! Nikki was recently named as an assistant principal in her school district in Livingston, Louisiana and has a passion for supporting parents and guardians. She has offered workshops locally with great success and now she has arranged sessions to support parents for free everywhere as part of her #VIA20 Innovator project.

Nikki is an incredible presenter and has represented and supported her local GEG, the Google Educator Group of South Louisiana, in incredible ways. These trainings will be streamed on the Global GEG YouTube channel where she has also presented with wild success. Thirteen sessions (and growing) will be held from August 16th-20th on a spectrum of tools students use regularly. Some sessions are also offered in Spanish and Mandarin as well.

The events will all he held live and recordings will be available immediately after. No registration is required and any and every parent is invited!

For more information, visit bit.ly/gguardians

GEG Brazil - GEG On Air

GEG On Air 37: Creating Escape Rooms in Google Forms - Google Innovator Vanessa Bohn shared how to create escape rooms using Google Forms to engage students in a different and fun way. Links to the recording and slides.