It’s National Child Protection Week - a week to think about how we can play our part to keep kids safe. At Google, we know how important it is to protect and educate young people on using the Internet.
One of the things we do is provide parents and teachers with tools to help them choose what content their children see online, such as Google SafeSearch and Safety Mode on YouTube. You can learn how to use these tools on our Family Safety Centre.
We also work closely with Australian organisations dedicated to educating and protecting young people. Our partner, Bravehearts, is holdingWhite Balloon Day today. This is a day to raise awareness for the victims of child sexual assault. It’s also Bravehearts’ principal fundraising initiative which enables them to educate, empower and protect Aussie kids.
Another of our partners, NAPCAN, the National Association for the Prevention of Child Abuse and Neglect, hasthese suggestionsfor how you can play your part during National Child Protection Week.
Let’s all play our part to keep Aussie kids safe.
Posted by Ishtar Vij, Public Policy and Government Affairs, Google Australia
One of the things I love about working Google is that you can come up with an idea one day and the next day start getting to work to make it a reality. That's what happened with the Art Project—a new tool we're announcing today which puts more than 1,000 works of art at your fingertips, in extraordinary detail.
It started when a small group of us who were passionate about art got together to think about how we might use our technology to help museums make their art more accessible—not just to regular museum-goers or those fortunate to have great galleries on their doorsteps, but to a whole new set of people who might otherwise never get to see the real thing up close.
We're also lucky here to have access to technology like Picasa and App Engine and to have colleagues who love a challenge—like building brand-new technology to enable Street View to go indoors! Thanks to this, and our unique collaboration with museums around the world, we were able to turn our 20% project into something you can try out for yourself today at www.googleartproject.com.
You’ll find a selection of super high-resolution images of famous works of art as well as more than a thousand other images, by more than 400 artists—all in one place. And with Street View technology, you can take a virtual tour inside 17 of the world’s most acclaimed art museums, including The Metropolitan Museum of Art and MoMA in New York, The State Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg, Tate Britain & The National Gallery in London, Museo Reina Sofia in Madrid, the Uffizi Gallery in Florence and Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam.
Dive into brushstroke-level detail: On top of the 1,000+ other images, each of the 17 museums selected one artwork to be photographed in extraordinary detail using super high resolution or “gigapixel” photo-capturing technology. Each of these images contains around 7 billion pixels—that's that’s around 1,000 times more detailed than your average digital camera—and a specially-built “microscope view” uses Picasa to deliver these images at amazingly high resolution. You can zoom in to see Van Gogh’s famous brushwork or watch how previously hard to-see elements of an artwork suddenly become clear—such as the tiny Latin couplet which appears in Hans Holbein the Younger’s “The Merchant Georg Gisze.”
Explore inside the museums: the Street View team designed a brand-new vehicle called the “trolley” to take 360-degree images of the interior of selected galleries. These were then stitched together and mapped to their location, enabling smooth navigation of more than 385 rooms within the museums. We also created a new clickable annotation feature, so you can jump from being inside a museum one moment to viewing a particular artwork the next. Once inside an image, an info panel lets you read more about an artwork, find more works by that artist and watch related YouTube videos. Gallery interiors can also be explored directly from within Street View in Google Maps.
Create your own collection: With the “Create an Artwork Collection” feature, you can save specific views of any of the artworks and build your own personalised collection. Comments can be added to each painting and the whole collection can then be shared with friends, family or on the web using the integrated goo.gl URL shortener.
We’re incredibly excited about this project—it’s our first step toward making great art more accessible, and we hope to add more museums and works of art in time. So whether you’re a student, an aspiring artist or a casual museum-goer, we hope the Google Art Project gives you a fun and unusual way to interact with art—and hopefully inspires you to visit the real thing.
Australia’s next generation of voters have spoken in Student Voice 2010 - and have elected the Gillard Labor government to be returned to power for another term. It was a close call however. Labor won by three seats and the Coalition won the popular vote with the highest share of individual votes amongst the 5000 15-17 year-old Australian students who took part.
Of the 72 electorates across Australia where the student vote was captured, Labor won 28 lower house seats, the Coalition 25 seats, the Greens 15 seats, with Christian Democrat Party, Independent, Family First and One Nation all winning one seat each. The ALP was strongest in NSW and Victoria where it won 21 out of 28 seats, while the Coalition took 15 of the 25 seats in the resource-rich states of Queensland and Western Australia, including the marginal seat of Hasluck with the Liberal candidate gaining 56% of votes.
The Greens were strongest in Victoria and stormed into retiring Labor MP Lindsay Tanner’s seat of Melbourne - winning more than half the student votes in that electorate.
In the Senate, there was a big swing to the Greens, with Australian students voting for 16 Green Senators, matching the ALP, and only marginally behind that of the Coalition.
Google developed Student Voice as an education opportunity for young Australians to experience a fundamental democratic process, vote and make their voice heard. We adopted standards and processes from the Australian Electoral Commission to ensure that the experience was as real as possible. More than five thousand school students voted for lower and upper house candidates via online ballot in classrooms, playgrounds and libraries. You can see a more detailed breakdown of results here at google.com.au/studentvoice2010.
The next generation of voters will go online to find political information, contact government and vote. Student Voice 2010 is an exercise in democracy and we hope it inspires students to engage and make their voices heard. Here are some fun snaps which schools sent through.
Ignatius Park College, Townsville
Westminister School, South Australia
Posted by Alan Noble, Engineering Director Google Australia and New Zealand
I'm excited to announce the inaugural Google Australia Eureka Prize for Innovation in Computer Science. The $10,000 prize will be awarded annually to an individual or team of Aussies who demonstrate real innovation in computer science.
Each year, the Australian Museum Eureka Prizes reward excellence in research and innovation, science leadership, school science, and science journalism and communication. Google is delighted to sponsor a new category as part of the Eureka awards.
Here at Google we're passionately committed to innovation in computer science. We hope that by encouraging future generations to embrace the power of an IT education now, we'll foster our next generation of innovators. As part of our ongoing support, we have set up other grants including the 2010 Google Australia and New Zealand Anita Borg Memorial Scholarship which is aimed at helping Australian women become global IT leaders.
Entries in the Google Australia Eureka Prize for Innovation in Computer Science should be cutting-edge and represent a tangible advance in their field. The winning innovation will have the potential to improve the lives of many other Australians.
You can enter as an individual or as a team, and your submission can take the form of a research contribution, commercial product or completely private work such as an open source development.
Enter online here and submit your form along with your supporting documents before midnight AEST Friday May 7, 2010.
Best of luck!
Posted by Alan Noble, Engineering Director Google Australia and New Zealand
With the recent announcement that hundreds of thousands of UK students are moving to Google Apps, there are now more than six million students, staff, and faculty around the world using Google at school. In the US, a recent survey reported that of those universities that had converted to hosted student email, 56% are going Google. The trend is similar here, with more and more Australian universities getting on to Google Apps.
For the University of Western Australia, implementing Google Apps for its 30,000 students meant offering a compelling set of features while allowing staff to focus on their core competencies. "The service we could offer for students through Google Apps was much better than we could reasonably hope to provide ourselves. Our staff can now concentrate on the things we do best - serving the teaching and research needs of the University," said John Arfield, University Librarian and Director (Information Management). "Providing a good experience for our students is a very high priority at UWA. The students are delighted, and so are we."
Over at the University of Adelaide, the ITS team who implemented Google Apps for their 16,000 students in early 2009 recently scooped the primary award at the Universities Services and Resources Annual Awards for Excellence (pictured below is the University of Adelaide project team managed by Bianca Velder (third from right) receiving their award on November 19 this year). Google Apps went live for the University of Adelaide on March 16, after a 5 month planning and development period. The University saw a 50% take up rate within two weeks of go-live, students were enthusiastic to make the switch from the previous mail system to Google Apps.
"Google Apps allows the university to deliver seamlessly integrated email, calendaring and IM services to students with significant capacity, and the migration has been a huge success for the university" says Virginia Deegan, director, infrastructure, property and technology. "The strength of Google Apps Education edition lies in the ease of implementation and the ability to deliver an integrated and flexible platform for collaboration and communication technologies in the future. All at no cost to the University, and that was a compelling story to us.
"Post implementation surveys show a very high student satisfaction with Google Apps. Many students offer suggestions how we can add value to the student experience, by increasing the functionality of Google Apps as a teaching and learning environment. Google Apps is rapidly becoming part of the DNA of the university, and that is exactly what we hoped for".
Across in Melbourne, at Australia's largest university Monash, Alan McMeekin, CIO and Executive Director IT Services Division is very pleased with the outcome for their 58,000 students and staff. "Monash has a commitment to principles of equity and diversity, so accessibility of services for students is important. We want to remove the blocks that prevent students from learning and growing. Google is one of the few products that provides a html version for email that works well with assistive technology." For Alan, demand from students and the support Google offered with the implementation were two key ingredients in a successful implementation. "The demand from students to participate in the pilot was encouraging, with over two hundred students registering in a weekend. Google have been great to work with on the implementation, providing dedicated resources and making changes where necessary to ensure Monash's move to Google is successful."
Lisa Marsh, Manager of the Flexible Learning and Teaching Program at Monash, leads the team that builds and runs the award winning my.monash portal for staff and students. In partnership with Calvin Chow, IT Analyst and Project lead, Lisa lead the project to migrate students to Google Apps. "The team are excited by the move to Google Apps. Calendar, email space, and collaboration tools have always been high demand items with students. We're also working on integrating Google Apps with other core university services via the my.monash portal, so there's lots of excitement around the potential to enhance the student experience. It's great to be running a project that is overwhelmingly positive. The pilot was oversubscribed by students. We're already getting 'thank you' email".
We look forward to working closely with more Australian universities and making 2010 a year in which even more students across Australia get the benefits of going Google.
While the internet has changed the way we connect with friends and do business, it's also made huge changes in the world of education. Teachers in Australia and New Zealand are embracing cloud computing, allowing them to achieve a wide range of learning outcomes and, more importantly, make learning fun.
Laurie Wales, a Google Certified Teacher from the Catholic Schools Office in Newcastle Australia, is well-versed in the value that online tools can deliver in the classroom. In a presentation at the recent Victorian Information Technology Teachers Association Conference, Laurie ran a workshop titled "Connect - Construct - Collaborate". The workshop demonstrated how Google Sites can be used to create an e-portfolio, allowing students to record, archive and share their work with peers, parents, class, school and the world – and showcased how developing projects using Google applications has the potential to bring teachers and students together by making them part of a "global community".
Across the ditch in New Zealand, cloud computing in the classroom is also really hotting up.
Fendalton School in Christchurch, New Zealand uses Google Docs extensively to help staff collaborate on team meeting agendas, track meeting minutes and manage their budgets. The school also uses Google Docs in the classroom to help children as young as seven get organised and receive immediate peer feedback on class presentations through online forms. Blogs are also used extensively across the school, allowing students to discuss key events and helping parents break through the typical "What did you do at school today?" silence. Fendalton School's new web site, FOS Live, is driven through Google Docs and pulls in RSS feeds from class blogs to share learning as it happens in classrooms. This has the potential to reduce traditional barriers between school and the home. In the video below, Fendalton School's Rob Clarke describes some of the uses of Google tools by Fendalton teachers and students. There are even plans to use Google's OpenSocial tools on this school web site.
Pt England School in Auckland, New Zealand, has taken this one step further using a range of Google tools to make learning fun. The school's principal, Russell Burt, describes their approach as giving students the space to collaborate with each other and with people worldwide to create and remix content, and to share their work in a manner that was previously only available to the highly technically skilled. To see what the kids at Pt England have been up to, check out the video below.
If you're interested in learning more about using Google Apps in the classroom, you can find a number of online resources, including class plans, here. Or, visit the Google for Educators Discussion Group to engage with other educators and share information about Google in education.
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