Remarks from a former Google CEO

Some of you are already aware that I took some personal days this past week in order to attend my youngest daughter’s graduation ceremony from Va Tech.  The commencement speaker was Eric Schmidt,  who, for over ten years was the  CEO of Google.  YouTube has made it possible for me to replay those remarks and pass along an abridged version of his address as the subject of this post.  Please keep in mind that I am not copying from a formal printed document, rather I’m transcribing from a speech, therefore the punctuation and phrasing won’t be exactly as it would be had it been prepared for publication.

             …"You're connecting to each other in ways that it was not possible before.  You're using those connections to strengthen invisible ties that hold humanity together.   The connections are what make us human.  They're the things that make  us stronger, ...

If you're awake you're on line, ...you're connected, ...some of you are probably texting right now....Don't take that power for granted.  What you carry with you every day can change the world.  When I was in college, I spent the summers working at Burris Hall in the computer center and the computer center consisted of one computer called an IBM 371-58 and it had a megabit of memory and a  megahertz of processing power, and I was talking to someone the other day and they said "Oh it's a room with a computer,  and I said ‘No, no,  you don't understand, the computer was as big as the room’, ...  and it probably cost around a 10 million dollars.

 Now take a break  from snap chatting and just listen to these numbers, In your phone you probably got 64 or 128 gigabytes of computation for let's say $500 plus or minus,  unsubsidized  That's  20,000 times cheaper and  100,000 times faster, so it's  two trillion times more useful than the computer i used here forty years ago.

Mr. Schmidt pointed out that the commencement address he delivered in 1999 is not on line...

 …because YouTube wasn't invented. And I didn't have a smart phone because they weren't invented, Google was one year old…Amazon was still only a bookstore. Facebook had not been founded.   You couldn't use Twitter, …and, of course, Google Maps  didn't exist, .....So, when you think about it, that's a lot of change, ....[when I was in college] all of our information was what our teachers told us. … now you can know almost everything about everything, .....[just by using]  your smartphone.

If you change the way you approach things,  then you have an opportunity to change the way your life begins.  In other words you chose to live this way… So figure out a way to take advantage of these tools,…  You're the Internet generation, you grew up on line.   You’re the first generation to literally grow up with this as ubiquitous.  It's interesting that I hear lots of people bemoaning this generation, specifically that you all grew up living life [in front of] computer screens always connected to something or someone.  I'm absolutely convinced that these critics are wrong.  The fact that we are now all connected is a blessing.  It's a blessing for safety. It's a blessing for education.  It's a blessing for world peace.  It's a blessing for economic growth.   It's a blessing for your business futures…

 A world's worth of information is perpetually now at your fingertips.  This opens the door to all sorts of interesting questions: How are we going to process all of this data?  … How will you use it?  How will you use it for  good?  How will we find the right balance between letting the data lead us and following our inherent creative and brilliant human intuition….

It is interesting that in the digital age, analysis and interpretation  are even more important than factual knowledge,  ...So here's the deal, …Just because we know so much doesn't mean our problems go away.  The future, doesn't just happen.  …Technology doesn't work on its own.  It's just  a tool.   You're the ones who harness its power.  You're the ones who lead it.  It's in our service and in particular in your service.   It's up to you to know your environment and to use these new tools at your disposal in the smartest and most effective ways possible... A computer is obviously capable of identifying insights…but, the truth is there's plenty we can do and we need to do for ourselves. Intuition, compassion and creativity, these are the things that make us special, ...These are the things we do much better than machines and that define us as humans....

So we're on a cusp of a new and much larger scale of innovation. ...  [Progress will be made in areas such as climate change, fighting cancer, etc…]   But, someone has to make it happen and those people are you.  Computers won't just do this.  It's not going to happen on an auto pilot and it's not going to happen because computers think it's going to happen.  You need to drive it.   You need to make it happen.  ...All  of us are counting on you.   The future that you're building is mine too, ...I need you to do some things; ...I need you to be curious...Ask a lot of questions and go out and try to find the answers.  Don't accept traditional or conventional wisdom.  …When someone says you're thinking too big, say, ‘I don't think I'm thinking big enough.’ 

I thought all of this is a good reminder that technology is a tool which we have to use if we are to connect with today’s digital generation.  Also, teaching this generation higher order thinking skills is far more important than the impartation of facts, after all, students can find all the facts in the world merely by taking their phones out of their pockets.  We need to help them develop the skills for using these facts.

Digital Story Telling Across the Globe

Once upon a time, when I first became an ITRT, I had a foreign language teacher ask me about setting up Email pen pals. Due to a number of factors, I was unable to make that happen at that time. However, last year, as part of my effort to become certified in technology integration, I had to prove that I “develop and model cultural understanding and global awareness by engaging with colleagues and students of other cultures using digital-age communication and collaboration tools.” So, I returned to the Email pen pal concept (knowing that some of the obstacles had been removed) and proposed to Donna McAvene (AHS) that we attempt to find Spanish speaking pen pals for her Spanish learners. When we began to investigate further, it looked like Epals.com would be just the site to use to make Epal connections.

We soon found that the Epals site suggested various projects for the students to work on as they exchanged notes with their Internet pen pals. A series of step by step lesson plans, and links to samples accompanied these suggested projects.

We “advertised” Mrs. McAvene’s class as wanting to create and exchange digital stories. Eventually, we contacted a teacher listed in Epals as having a class in Spain. Susan Degler, it turned out, had not had good experiences with one on one exchanges. When she had tried that in the past, she always had some of her students who wound up being paired with “pals” who turned out to be duds—didn’t respond. Therefore, Susan suggested a many to many exchange.

To facilitate this, Susan set up two linked websites and invited two other classes—one in Arkansas and one in Saskatchewan, Canada. One site was a Wiki—a site where students could go and easily comment to one another and discuss the progress they were making on the digital stories. (click here to view this site) Additionally, they were free to ask about each other’s favorite music, the school day, fashion, or whatever. They were also free to discuss this in the language of their choice—although Mrs. McAvene discouraged the use of tools such as Google Translate—and preferred to personally monitor the student’s use of Spanish. At the conclusion of the project students used this site to ask one another questions that were prompted by the videos they had viewed (those made by other students).

The other site was created at weebly.com, which bills itself as “the easiest way to create a website.” Only the teachers could create pages and enter content on the Weebly site. It was here that we uploaded and posted the finished videos. Unfortunately, after writing this review, our year of "pro" status expired and the vast majority of the videos I posted are no longer available (unless we want to start paying). You can still click here to view this site, but you willo only see two of our videos.

Now, I’m more in tune to the technology standards that were taught through this project than I am to the Spanish standards. However, the Spanish related objectives should be immediately apparent to foreign language teachers. First, the students had opportunity to try out their Spanish, both written and verbal, on some “genuine Spanish speakers”, second, they had opportunity to learn about the culture of a Spanish speaking country—Spain itself. This objective figures prominently in the State’s standards for teaching Spanish.

As to the technological aspects of the project, Mrs. McAvene had produced class videos in the past, but, this was her first attempt at having multiple students produce videos. I was for having the students work in groups of two or three, but, Mrs. McAvene wanted to have each student fully responsible for creating a video. I think this turned out to be a wise decision, in the end, very few of the students failed to produce a work, and no one could hide behind the hard work of someone else.

We were somewhat apprehensive about how this would go. We needlessly worried over decisions like; should we make the hundred dollar flip cameras available for students to take home? As it turned out, no student even asked us about that. They each had access to a digital camera or at least a phone that could take pictures. My primary role came in figuring out how to get the pictures off the phones and in to editable formats and then uploading the finished videos for the students.

To prepare the students for editing the videos I simply turned on the LCD projector and opened up the editing software already on the computer. A students who was already familiar with the basics sat down at the teacher laptop and I gave him instructions such as “Okay, now add a transition, now add a title page, etc.” Ten minutes later the students in the class felt confident that they were up to the task, and they were eager to start. We also found a couple of Internet video production sites--Animoto -and Stupfelix where the students set up accounts and pretty much figure things out as they went. They chose themes, and background music, etc. They also added Title pages, subtitles, and credits without any apparent difficulty. Some simply sent me the embed code right from these sites. Now this may get a bit tricky for anyone who is perhaps inspired to try a similar project. That’s what ITRTs are for, to help you wade through the deep waters of embed code and such—don’t sweat it, let one of us help you.

That’s really what I’m getting at here. Any of the ITRTs would be delighted to help a teacher with a project similar to this one. From this experience I learned not to sweat the particulars of how students are going to get pictures or make video clips—that was easier than anticipated. I’d also be inclined to spend less time preparing the class for the project and allow more time for reflection (and exchanges with their foreign counterparts) upon completing of the videos.

If I've interested you in doing a project similar to this one, do not hesitate to contact your friendly, local ITRT.