Sessions at Google Apps for Education UK User Group - February 2011 on Tuesday 15th February

Martin Hamilton from Loughborough University (event organizer) will introduce the day and run through logistics.

Niall Sclater (Director of Learning Innovation at the Open University) describes the their evaluation process and the challenges involved in migrating 200,000 students to Google Apps.

Jon Warbrick (Information Systems Team Leader at the University of Cambridge) discusses the unique challenges of deploying Google Apps in a collegiate environment, and Cambridge's systems integration approach.

Mike Conner and Sean McAndrew from Google Enterprise Partner AppsBroker discuss their recent projects to migrate Jaguar Landrover and Taylor Woodrow to Google Apps.

Tony Hirst is a Lecturer at the Open University, best known for his exploits "mashing up" Web 2.0 services and championing open data. Tony will demonstrate some of the lesser known features of common tools such as Google Docs spreadsheets. Did you know you could automatically pull the contents of a web page into a spreadsheet, treat them as a database using SQL statements, and then visualize the results?

Nick Skelton (Assistant Director of IT at the University of Bristol), Aline Hayes (Director of Information Systems and Technology at Sheffield Hallam University) and Chris Sexton (Director of Corporate Information and Computing Services at the University of Sheffield and UCISA chair) discuss their experiences of building up an internal business case for moving to cloud services / Google Apps, and work through some common questions.

Your opportunity for five minutes of fame! Any and all topics welcome - first come, first served. Session chair Sheila MacNeill (Assistant Director of JISC CETIS) will keep order :-)

Mark Allen from Ed in the Clouds and Zoe Ross from DoDigital demonstrate the sort of collaborative learning environments which they are currently building for school students as young as four. Even before they can write, students 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. Come along and see how Mark, Zoe, and others like them tackle this challenge and discover what sort of environment the undergraduate intake of 2025 are already familiar with..."

Peter Sellek (Development Leader at Leeds Metropolitan University) will describe the work that his team undertook to integrate the Serco Facility CMIS timetabling system with Google Apps to give students their own personalized timetables. This is now available through Serco as an optional module for CMIS.

Manish Malik (Faculty Learning and Teaching Coordinator at the University of Portsmouth) and Steve Wheeler (Associate Professor of Learning Technology at the University of Plymouth) discuss the recent developments and the patterns emerging within the CMS/LMS/VLE product sector. From BB & Moodle 1.0 to BBoogle & Moodle 2.0:Google to Sakai 3.0/Canvas to a pure GApps based learning environment. On demo will be an application that shows the potential of Google Apps in creating an open Virtual Learning Environment or a "Cloud Learning Environment".

Claudio Cherubino from Google Developer Relations will give delegates a whirlwind tour of the Google Apps Marketplace from a developer perspective. The Google Apps Marketplace lets you create seamlessly integrated apps of your own, delivered through Google's infrastructure and APIs.

Google's Sam Peter and William Florance will lead an open house discussion responding to points raised during the event and beforehand via Google Moderator.