Daniel Russell - Google Apps For Education New England Summit - Speaker Profile #2

We are excited to host the first ever Google Apps for Education New England Summit here at BHS on November 3 and 4.  The list of speakers has been finalized for the weekend and its is an amazing group that you will not want to miss. 

My second speaker profile of the two mazing keynotes is focused on Daniel Russell Google's Űber Tech Lead for Search Quality and User Happiness.  Daniel, the  will provide our opening keynote on Sunday morning. He recently conducted an open course for thousands to become better web searchers and his blog SearchResearch is a must read!

Here's a bit more on Daniel from the Summit's website:

Daniel Russell is the Űber Tech Lead for Search Quality and User Happiness in Mountain View.  He earned his PhD in computer science, specializing in Artificial Intelligence before he realized that magnifying and understanding human intelligence was his real passion.  Twenty years ago he foreswore AI in favor of HI, and now enjoys teaching, learning, running and music, preferably all in one day.  He worked at Xerox PARC before it was PARC.com, and was in the Advanced Technology Group at Apple where he wrote the first 100 web pages for www.Apple.com using SimpleText.  He also worked at IBM and briefly at a startup that developed tablet computers before the iPad.  

His keynote focuses on what it means to be literate in the age of Google - at a time when you can search billions of texts in milliseconds.  Although you might think that "literacy" is one of the great constants that transcends the ages, the skills of a literate person have changed substantially over time as texts and technology allow for new kinds of reading and understanding.  Knowing how to read is just the beginning of it - knowing how to frame a question, pose a query, interpret the texts that you find, organize (and use) the information you discover, and understand your metacognition - these are all critical parts of being literate as well.  In his talk Dan reviews what literacy means today and shows how some very surprising and unexpected skills will turn out to be critical in the years ahead.

Jaime Casap - Google Apps For Education New England Summit - Speaker Profile #1

We are excited to host the first ever Google Apps for Education New England Summit here at BHS on November 3 and 4.  The list of speakers has been finalized for the weekend and its is an amazing group that you will not want to miss. 

I have decided to quickly profile one of the speakers over the next few days to offer a preview of what is to come.  Kicking things off for us on Saturday with our opening Keynote will be Google's Senior Education Evangelist Jaime Casap.

Here's a bit on Jaime from the Summit's website:

Jaime Casap is the Senior Education Evangelist at Google, Inc. With more than 15 years of technology experience, he is responsible for working with K12 educational institutions and organizations to bring current and future technological innovations into the education environment. Mr. Casap evangelizes the power of technology and the use of Google tools, such as Google Apps and Chromebooks, to help students build the skills needed to succeed, close the digital divide, and help level the playing field. He has worked with hundreds of school systems and states to build the capability to bring Google tools to millions of teachers and students.

Mr. Casap is also a Faculty Associate at Arizona State University, where he teaches classes in organizational behavior, leadership, and innovation. He serves on the Advisory Board of Directors for New Global Citizens and the Arizona STEM Education Program, and is a member of the Digital Education Council. He holds a Bachelor’s Degree from the State University of New York at Brockport and a Master’s from Arizona State University.

We have been discussing the integration of technology in education for as long as most of us can remember.  In his keynote, Jaime will examine technology's role in education and why now it's no longer a question of whether we should integrate technology in education, but rather it is now a question of how we can leverage it to build the skills students will need to compete on a global scale.

You can check out all of the presenters here and the full schedule for the summit here.