Now I'm All Googley!

It has been almost a month since I attended the GTASWE 2013 in Stockholm, Sweden and I promised to write a post about the experience.  Well, it was a blast for sure and well worth the effort of applying, making the video, getting myself to the GTA in the last week before our long winter break, and then trying to recover from being away from school for three days during the last days before Christmas.

Be prepared to put in long, full-on days at the GTA, meet lots of great, innovative and inspiring people F2F and online, work really hard with learning new tools and expanding your world, and then crash afterwards.  I was only gone for two nights, but I didn't get much sleep while I was away.  Not that jet-lag was a problem for me (like it was for some others coming from the US or Asia), as I only changed one time zone.  The work days were just long (and dark in Sweden in December), so it was late to bed and early to rise . . . breakfast was served at the Google offices early each morning and I had a 2 km walk each way from where I was staying.

The biggest take-away for me from the GTA was certainly the people that I met and worked with, and the network of GCTs that I am now hooked up with.  As an Apple Distinguished Educator, I know how valuable such a network of people can be as a resource, guide, mentor and sounding board - the growth and learning with Google started at the GTA and has been running full throttle ever since through the Google+ GCT group, which is very active and dynamic.

Becoming a Google Certified Teacher (GCT) involves creating an Action Plan for a Google related project that you endeavour to tackle over the next year.  "How are you going to change your world?" was the project question . . . I went to the GTA with no clear idea about what my project would be, but over the course of the two days, it all started to take shape in my mind.  On the first morning, I met Liz and we talked about a number of Google-related and topics over breakfast.  Without having any idea who she is or what her role at the GTA was, we got to talking about working in Poland and her connections here.  As I would be the first GCT in Poland, she wanted to talk later about how I might help her with something that she was already working on.  It turned out that Liz Sproat is the Head of Education for Google, EMEA (Europe, Middle East and Africa region) and she is working on a huge project to bring GAfE into Polish national schools.  After discussing this more before the GTA finished, this has grown into the "big part" of my project.  The "smaller part" of what I want to do involves creating and sharing a Google Lit Trip for my father's memoir "Things That Must Not Be Forgotten: A childhood in wartime China" (by Michael David Kwan).  If you are interested in the progress of either of these parts of my project, then have a look here at my Action Plan Site.