Applying for the Google Teacher Academy

I’m happy to announce I was accepted to the Google Teacher Academy in London on July 29th. Google sent out emails of acceptance last Friday; I excitedly squealed via Twitter and Facebook (I think maybe LinkedIn too). One person responded with a congratulations as well as a “I thought that was for K-12 educators.” I’m writing this blog as a longer response to that tweet…
This summer I’m one of the instructors in one of our MCC Study Abroad programs, the one going to England. I already knew I was going to be in England the month of July when Google announced the GTA in London, so I applied! Granted, I knew it was a long shot since they explicitly said that they target K-12 educators; however, the call for proposals also emphasized a commitment to sharing ideas through various professional development activities--which I do, a lot! Not only am I active within my community college district as well as in my discipline, I also work with local K-12 educators through connections I’ve made on my own as well as through the ATLAST grant project.
Knowing that my application was a long shot since I did not exactly fit their criteria, I decided not to spend too much time completing it (I’m not saying I spent no time, just didn’t treat it like a $50k grant).  Specifically, I did not want to spend too much time making the one minute video required for the application. Therefore, I decided what I was going to say and then put together the video. I decided I would “argue” (I’m a rhetorician!) that “Classroom Innovation equals Playing and Sharing.” I then searched for images representing ”Playing” and ”Sharing” at Flickr licensed under Creative Commons. I then used Audacity to record my short blurb about playing and sharing. I used Macromedia Fireworks (what I already had loaded on my computer) to add some simple attributions to the images as well as add some key words from my audio file. I then uploaded the images and audio to Animoto and let Animoto edit together the video.

This is not a polished video; however, it does the job of conveying my beliefs about classroom innovation. The Google proposal form gave a space for any extra comments about the video. I basically outlined my process and articulated that the photo editing, just adding words on top of the images, could have been done in Flickr’s free editing software. I mentioned that I like trying to use technologies that are free and have a relatively low learning curve, technologies that other faculty and students might use in their classes.

Besides being amazed that Google actually met their deadline of reviewing all the applications in just over a week (in academia we can take weeks, even months, to review proposals), I really appreciated the second line of their acceptance email:

After reviewing your application, we believe that you have the experience and passion necessary to positively impact education in your region, and we are excited to have you join us on Thursday 29 July 2010 at the Google office in London.

So, to answer my colleague about why I might have gotten accepted although I teach in higher education, I think it because I’m also clearly dedicated to “positively impacting education in my region.” I like playing with new technologies, I enjoy testing out ideas on how they might better facilitate teaching and learning, and I adore sharing my successes and failures with others.

June 29 2010 | Posted in Google