BroadMeadows gets its Groove on

Dateline: SIngapore.  My friend Paul, long time Groove veteran, moved to Singapore with his family to help globalize our Office Enterprise story.  He's out talking to customers throughout the asia pacific region, including Australia.  He writes in with this great story of Groove in action:

As part of my visit to Australia to see customers about Office Enterprise and Groove, I got the chance to sit down with BPS in Melbourne and see what they have in mind for their Schools of the Future project.

SUMMARY

BroadMeadows has created an amazing environment for children to learn via multimodal experiences: Document creation, video production, Mobile devices for discovery, pairing with older students who model successful learning skills, and learning the “how” of functioning on a team. All of this is tied together with Office, Movie Maker, OneNote, SharePoint, and using Groove as the virtual teaming technology to pull it together.

DETAILS ON GROOVE USAGE

The team invited us to visit and see actually what they are doing in their learning labs. I watched as the students came in to the lab, immediately sat down, and launched Groove. In this particular session, there were 15 kids. With minimal guidance they began working on various parts of the project. The students were saving materials into Groove and thus helping other sub-teams that might need some ideas on where to start. Chat and Discussion was used extensively. The sketchpad was used a lot as a place to brainstorm or just  doodle. The swarming nature of Groove was self-evident; as students got “stuck” other quickly swarmed in to help with comments, etc. The educators joined as well to help guide virtually.

Amazing as well was how quickly the students embraced the technology. Being an “old” Groove guy, I thought I might show them a thing or 2. Nope. Forget about it – they knew most of the tricks right from the start: linking, opening a tool in its own window, shift-shift for instant access to IMs, - wow! It makes me smile when I think of all the meetings with large corporations who worry so much about training.

The future plans for the technology are impressive – with labs in key schools they want to create virtual teaming across schools. As we know, often times in an urban public school setting there is a huge gap in performance based upon the challenges their students face at home in a particular district. Virtual teaming is a chance for the teachers to introduce more “successful behaviors” modeling from school to school without having to resort to the heavier handed methods of forced busing or district integration techniques that many public school districts around the world have tried with varying degrees of success.

 I know the pain first hand – I came from a public school district that tried this – and failed. Virtual teaming for students across schools has great promise for solving this age-old problem while minimizing the disruption to students.

Link to this article: https://blogs.technet.com/groove/archive/2007/05/22/broadmeadows-students-get-their-groove-on.aspx