How to use Google Classroom @ EdUHK

For a while now our course tutors have hit a brick wall with trying to access Google Classroom so that they can collaborate with their students. The simple barrier is this: staff and students are on separate domains. The former is on a "friends" domain and the students are on an "s" domain. Google Classroom, as far as I know, only works within the same domain. So the simple fix is this. Get a student account and set up your Google Classroom there.

How do I get started?

Write an email to the OCIO Helpdesk [helpdesk@ocio.eduhk.hk]
Inform them in the email that you would like to have a student account so that you can use Google Classroom.
Fill out the form that they will provide you and have your department or faculty head sign off on the document and also get your department/faculty chop on the document.

Due to the excellent efficiency of the OCIO staff, I had my account ready to go the next day!

The Icky Sticky World of Research Grants

One thing that I'm starting to become familiar with is the world of research and proposals. This is something that I've never had to do in the past, but it's rapidly becoming part of my cycle of thoughts are research grants. There are so many out there and I have to say that the University Grants Committee (UGC) in Hong Kong has made some very smart decisions to encourage people in academia to conduct research. As someone who has never done research, the hardest part is getting started. So borrowing from the startup world, they've introduced a the Early Career Scheme which is a way of starting many frugal research grants to help potential researchers get their feet wet and go through a small version of a research cycle. I find it very encouraging and would like to find a way to get my previous blog idea started with one of the grants in this scheme. For future reference, this link is a comprehensive list of grants available in Hong Kong and their submission schedule. This is only available to EdUHK Staff with your "friends" account. If you don't have one, you don't need this information.

BEd Reading Challenge

Recently, I've been searching for a way to fund my reading idea. The idea is a year level based reading challenge. I've made a site using Google Sites that lists the rules and conditions of the contest and on it there is a link to a Google Form. The innovative part here is that Google Forms allows students to upload images to a form. Using this feature, having the students take a selfie with the text in question as a way to support the assertion that this student read the book. Also there are a few barriers to entry. Each form entry requires the student to input some basic information such as the title and author of the book and it includes a tick box to select genre. 

The hope is that bachelor of education students will access more texts in English and hopefully improve their academic performance in English, which is their second language. 

Here the funding is difficult because I would like to get a grant to run this project, but really all the funding is for research which would track and measure the impact of such a scheme. With the data collected from several different cohorts, the ways in which these data can be analysed are many. But they don't really support the impact that I was hoping for. I just wanted to keep it simple and sustainable and promote future teachers' access to English language texts.