Editor’s Note: As part of the #ItTakesATeacher movement, we’re hosting a free, online conference on December 3 - Education on Air: It Takes a Teacher - to celebrate educators around the world and allow teachers to learn from each other. Register today.

At Education on Air: It Takes a Teacher, we’ll be celebrating educators and exploring the future of education and technology. Here’s a glimpse at the sessions we’ve lined up for December 3rd:

Keynotes from change makers and thought leaders around the globe

Tune in to hear a welcome from Eric Schmidt, the executive chairman of Alphabet and Dr. Jill Biden, the Second Lady of the United States. Learn the story of how Jahana Hayes became the 2016 US National Teacher of the Year, and get tips on how she keeps her students engaged.

You’ll hear from Julia Gillard, 27th Prime Minister of Australia and chair of the Global Partnership for Education, who will talk about the importance of teaching and change, and Linda-Darling Hammond, President and CEO of the Learning Policy Institute and Stanford University Professor, will present research on the impact of technology in the classroom.

These are just some of the amazing speakers. You can check out the full schedule here.

Breakout sessions, led by educators for educators

Regardless of the age of the students you teach, you'll learn practical tips and tricks from other educators that you can apply right away. Here are just a few of the over 100 sessions for educators:

• “Fantastic feedback tools for Google Docs” led by Eric Curts, Technology Integration Specialist at SPARCC

• “Meeting the needs of 21st Century learners - Google Classroom, Learner Agency and Universal Design for Learning” led by Claire Hobson,Deputy Principal, Hobsonville Point Secondary School

• “Explore your world with Expeditions” led by Jennifer Holland, Google for Education program manager

• “A chromebook for every student at Wheatley Park School” led by Chris Bateman, Head of Technology & Enterprise at Wheatley Park School

Get PD credit

After the event, you can fill out a form to receive a certificate that verifies your attendance at Education on Air, which you can use to apply for PD credit in your state or region.

We hope these sessions get you excited for Education on Air. Even if you can’t make the whole conference, register now and we’ll let you know when the recordings are available.

Editor’s Note: As part of the #ItTakesATeacher movement, we’re hosting a free, online conference on December 3 - Education on Air: It Takes a Teacher - to celebrate educators around the world and allow teachers to learn from each other. Register today.

At Education on Air: It Takes a Teacher, we’ll be celebrating educators and exploring the future of education and technology. Here’s a glimpse at the sessions we’ve lined up for December 3rd:

Keynotes from change makers and thought leaders around the globe

Tune in to hear a welcome from Eric Schmidt, the executive chairman of Alphabet and Dr. Jill Biden, the Second Lady of the United States. Learn the story of how Jahana Hayes became the 2016 US National Teacher of the Year, and get tips on how she keeps her students engaged.

You’ll hear from Julia Gillard, 27th Prime Minister of Australia and chair of the Global Partnership for Education, who will talk about the importance of teaching and change, and Linda-Darling Hammond, President and CEO of the Learning Policy Institute and Stanford University Professor, will present research on the impact of technology in the classroom.

These are just some of the amazing speakers. You can check out the full schedule here.

Breakout sessions, led by educators for educators

Regardless of the age of the students you teach, you'll learn practical tips and tricks from other educators that you can apply right away. Here are just a few of the over 100 sessions for educators:

• “Fantastic feedback tools for Google Docs” led by Eric Curts, Technology Integration Specialist at SPARCC

• “Meeting the needs of 21st Century learners - Google Classroom, Learner Agency and Universal Design for Learning” led by Claire Hobson,Deputy Principal, Hobsonville Point Secondary School

• “Explore your world with Expeditions” led by Jennifer Holland, Google for Education program manager

• “A chromebook for every student at Wheatley Park School” led by Chris Bateman, Head of Technology & Enterprise at Wheatley Park School

Get PD credit

After the event, you can fill out a form to receive a certificate that verifies your attendance at Education on Air, which you can use to apply for PD credit in your state or region.

We hope these sessions get you excited for Education on Air. Even if you can’t make the whole conference, register now and we’ll let you know when the recordings are available.

Editor’s Note: Google Expeditions has a number of lessons to help students learn about our military history this Veterans Day. Students can experience the history of World War I, World War II, and the Civil War, understand the key events that shaped those moments, and visit the memorials that commemorate them. Other Expeditions, such as the Artifacts of the Tuskegee Airmen and Pearl Harbor, let students explore planes, submarines, and ships from these historical periods. In addition to these Expeditions, Google Arts & Culture has a dedicated online collection of artifacts, archives, locations and dozens of stories related to World War II, including an online exhibition, Veterans Day: Reflections on Service, where students can hear stories from our veterans.

My days as a history instructor at the United States Military Academy are filled with reflections on military history. Having spent 12 years in the United States Army, I find that the lessons we teach can be deeply personal for me.

Each year in my History of Military Arts course, the students spend time learning about the history of the Civil War. The cadets work through a writing exercise that follows a brigade through a Civil War battle using primary sources. This year, to culminate the project, I incorporated Google Expeditions into the lesson. With Expeditions, the cadets were able to visit key locations in the Battle of Antietam and immerse themselves in the physical locale, all while learning key facts about the event. Reading accounts of a battle is always powerful, but showing my students the battlefield helped to paint a richer picture of this important piece of history. The cadets gained an understanding of the role of terrain in the battle that isn’t possible from written sources alone. Seeing historical images of the battlefield in the immediate aftermath of the battle, side-by-side within the current-day, 360-degree panorama, was especially powerful.

I remember the emotional impact of visiting Arlington National Cemetery on a past Veterans Day. Visiting the graves of over 400,000 active duty service members, veterans, and their families on a day of remembrance brought out a profound feeling of connection. It made me realize how powerful these hallowed places are for our cultural heritage. This year, with the help of Google Expeditions, students learning about our history and honoring those who have served will also be able to experience the poignancy of battlefields and landmarks memorializing those who sacrificed so much for our country.

Editor’s Note: At Education on Air, Google’s free online conference December 3, we’ll be celebrating educators and exploring the future of education and technology. Over the next few weeks, we’ll be sharing stories and tips from some of the speakers. Register today.

Ben Thomas, a learning and digital pedagogy coordinator at Xavier High School in Albury, New South Wales, Australia, talks about his mortgage payments, tax returns, and mobile phone plans when he teaches math class. No, he’s not oversharing – he’s using his finances to explain money and economic concepts in a way that resonates with students and encourages them to take part in the conversation. We spoke to Ben to learn more about his philosophy on getting students excited about connections between what they learn, and the real world.

It takes a teacher to create a classroom that students want to be in

Ben teaches math, information technology and software design to students in grades 7-12 at the Catholic high school. With a deep desire to help young people reach their potential, teaching has always been his calling. “I considered becoming an engineer, but the thought of sitting in an office all day didn’t appeal to me,” says Ben. “Now I get to engage with students every day.”

In every lesson, Ben’s goal is to create relatable moments with students. He offers personal stories to explain concepts better than traditional lessons would. To illustrate how interest rates work, he tells students about his own mortgage and how paying it down faster helps his family save money. He’ll also tell them about the value of taking deductions on a tax return, and why it’s smart financial planning to track expenses that can become tax writeoffs.

“It’s about making your classroom a place they want to be,” Ben says.“You can see the level of engagement increase when we talk about real-world stories.” In a recent lesson, he asked each student to find out if their mobile phone plan was a good deal. By encouraging the class to compare phone plans and calculate how much data they used, Ben sparked a discussion about saving money and being smart consumers.

It takes a teacher to share stories that illuminate lessons

When building a lesson around a real-life story, Ben looks for a moment that tells him the students want to hear more. “Maybe when you start, you have a few students looking out the window, or some of them working on assignments for their next class,” Ben says. “But when you discuss a shared experience that they can relate to, all eyes are on you – and the students become the ones asking questions.”

Since Xavier is a 1:1 school, Ben also uses Chromebooks to get students to work together on projects and share their insights. He’s a fan of “app smashing,” or pulling together several apps and tools so students can create work that’s shareable and rich with insights. For example, he’ll ask students to use Google Slides paired with VideoNot.es, an app for taking notes on the same screen as watching videos, to create presentations based on their shared research.

The activity involves having students create a presentation, then using a screen recording extension, such as SnagIt or Screencastify, to record them giving their presentation. Students can leave their classmates feedback on the presentation using Videonot.es.

It takes a teacher to spark student reflection

Much of what Ben tries to achieve with his students is reflection – that is, the ability to think about what they’re learning and consider how it impacts their lives. In mid-October, Ben, a teaching colleague, and a small group of students traveled on a week-long “immersion experience” to Barmah, Victoria where, in the 1930s, indigenous people, forced onto a reserve with poor living conditions, staged a walkout. The experience is designed to connect students to present-day indigenous people to hear about their history first-hand.

The trip, says Ben, is a perfect example of teaching that’s based on storytelling. Afterwards, one student described the lesson as “making sure that the wrongs of the past don’t happen again.” That’s the kind of reaction, Ben says, that tells teachers they’re doing a great job.

To connect with and learn from teachers like Ben, join us for Education on Air on December 3rd.

We invite you to join this movement by sharing what teachers mean to you with #ItTakesATeacher and seeing your own and others’ stories re-shared at google.com/edu/teacher.

Editor’s Note: At Education on Air, Google’s free online conference December 3, we’ll be celebrating educators and exploring the future of education and technology. Over the next few weeks, we’ll be sharing stories and tips from some of the speakers. Register today.

Ben Thomas, a learning and digital pedagogy coordinator at Xavier High School in Albury, New South Wales, Australia, talks about his mortgage payments, tax returns, and mobile phone plans when he teaches math class. No, he’s not oversharing – he’s using his finances to explain money and economic concepts in a way that resonates with students and encourages them to take part in the conversation. We spoke to Ben to learn more about his philosophy on getting students excited about connections between what they learn, and the real world.

It takes a teacher to create a classroom that students want to be in

Ben teaches math, information technology and software design to students in grades 7-12 at the Catholic high school. With a deep desire to help young people reach their potential, teaching has always been his calling. “I considered becoming an engineer, but the thought of sitting in an office all day didn’t appeal to me,” says Ben. “Now I get to engage with students every day.”

In every lesson, Ben’s goal is to create relatable moments with students. He offers personal stories to explain concepts better than traditional lessons would. To illustrate how interest rates work, he tells students about his own mortgage and how paying it down faster helps his family save money. He’ll also tell them about the value of taking deductions on a tax return, and why it’s smart financial planning to track expenses that can become tax writeoffs.

“It’s about making your classroom a place they want to be,” Ben says.“You can see the level of engagement increase when we talk about real-world stories.” In a recent lesson, he asked each student to find out if their mobile phone plan was a good deal. By encouraging the class to compare phone plans and calculate how much data they used, Ben sparked a discussion about saving money and being smart consumers.

It takes a teacher to share stories that illuminate lessons

When building a lesson around a real-life story, Ben looks for a moment that tells him the students want to hear more. “Maybe when you start, you have a few students looking out the window, or some of them working on assignments for their next class,” Ben says. “But when you discuss a shared experience that they can relate to, all eyes are on you – and the students become the ones asking questions.”

Since Xavier is a 1:1 school, Ben also uses Chromebooks to get students to work together on projects and share their insights. He’s a fan of “app smashing,” or pulling together several apps and tools so students can create work that’s shareable and rich with insights. For example, he’ll ask students to use Google Slides paired with VideoNot.es, an app for taking notes on the same screen as watching videos, to create presentations based on their shared research.

The activity involves having students create a presentation, then using a screen recording extension, such as SnagIt or Screencastify, to record them giving their presentation. Students can leave their classmates feedback on the presentation using Videonot.es.

It takes a teacher to spark student reflection

Much of what Ben tries to achieve with his students is reflection – that is, the ability to think about what they’re learning and consider how it impacts their lives. In mid-October, Ben, a teaching colleague, and a small group of students traveled on a week-long “immersion experience” to Barmah, Victoria where, in the 1930s, indigenous people, forced onto a reserve with poor living conditions, staged a walkout. The experience is designed to connect students to present-day indigenous people to hear about their history first-hand.

The trip, says Ben, is a perfect example of teaching that’s based on storytelling. Afterwards, one student described the lesson as “making sure that the wrongs of the past don’t happen again.” That’s the kind of reaction, Ben says, that tells teachers they’re doing a great job.

To connect with and learn from teachers like Ben, join us for Education on Air on December 3rd.

We invite you to join this movement by sharing what teachers mean to you with #ItTakesATeacher and seeing your own and others’ stories re-shared at google.com/edu/teacher.

Editor’s Note: Four years ago, we held our first Global Education Symposium, where we invited ministries of education and thought leaders from around the world to join us in a discussion about education in our rapidly changing global landscape. Each year since, we’ve been humbled to learn alongside the folks who make important country and system-wide policy decisions that impact the world’s teachers and learners. This article is part of that ongoing effort - on the eve of our fourth Symposium -  to explore and understand the issues facing the education industry and share what we learn along the way.  You can find more at https://www.google.com/edu/resources/global-education/.    

A generation ago, teachers could expect that what they taught would last for the life of their students. Today, schools need to prepare students for more rapid economic and social change than ever before, for jobs that haven’t been created, to use technologies that haven’t yet been invented, and to solve social problems that we can’t yet imagine. That’s why Google’s Education Symposium is taking education head-on, with the premise that the future is not about more of the same, but about transformation.

In traditional school systems, teachers have been provided an exact prescription for what to teach and then left alone in classrooms. The past was about delivered wisdom, the future is about user-generated wisdom.

The past was divided: you had teachers and content divided by subjects and student destinations; and the past was isolated: schools were designed to keep students inside, and the rest of the world outside. The future needs to be integrated, that means emphasising integration of subjects, integration of students and integration of learning contexts; and it needs to be connected: that means connected with real-world contexts, and also permeable to the rich resources in the community. Instruction in the past was subject-based, instruction in the future will be project based. The past was hierarchical, students were recipients and teachers the dominant resource, the future is co-created, and that means we need to recognise both students and adults as resources for the co-creation of communities, for the design of learning and for the success of students.

The future also needs to be collaborative, and that means changing working norms. In the flat world, everything that is our proprietary knowledge today will be a commodity available to everyone tomorrow. Because technology has enabled us to act on our imaginations in ways that we could never before, value is less and less created vertically through command and control, but increasingly so horizontally by whom we connect and work with. Success will be with those who master the new forms of collaboration. Expressed differently, we are seeing a shift from a world of stocks – with knowledge that is stacked up somewhere depreciating rapidly in value – to a world in which the enriching power of collaboration is rising.

In the past, different students were taught in similar ways. Now we need to embrace diversity with differentiated pedagogical practices. The past was curriculum-centered, the future is learner centered. The goals of the past were standardisation and compliance, that is, students are educated in batches of age, following the same standard curriculum, all assessed at the same time. The future is about personalising educational experiences, that is building instruction from student passions and capacities, helping students personalise their learning and assessment in ways that foster engagement and talents. In the past, schools were technological islands, that is technology was deployed mostly to support existing practices for efficiency gains. Future schools are empowered and use the potential of technologies to liberate learning from past conventions and connect learners in new and powerful ways. The past was interactive, the future is participative.

Traditionally, the policy focus was on the provision of education, we now need to shift from looking upwards in the bureaucracy towards looking outwards to the next teacher, the next school. The future is also about more innovative partnerships. Isolation in a world of complex learning systems will seriously limit potential. Powerful learning environments are constantly creating synergies and finding new ways to enhance professional, social and cultural capital with others. They do that with families and communities, with higher education, with other schools and learning environments, and with businesses. We still have far too few innovators and game changers in education. We need to find better ways to recognise, reward and give exposure to their successes. And we need to make it easier for them to take risks and encourage the emergence of new actors. This is challenging, but it is possible. The symposium is an opportunity to move this agenda forward.

Editor’s Note: As part of our ongoing celebration of World Teachers’ Day, we'll be sharing stories that demonstrate the creative power of teachers worldwide, building towards a global online gathering of educators on December 3: Education on Air. Register today. And join the movement by sharing what teachers mean to you with #ItTakesATeacher

For Arlene Parra, who teaches Spanish to 9th and 10th graders at High Tech High Media Arts in San Diego, inspiration for classroom projects is everywhere – on the street, at home and on campus. “You have to be open to the world you live in, and the world your students live in,” she says.

Teaching in a school where about half of students are Latino, Parra is committed to helping students connect with their culture through language and the arts. “I grew up speaking both English and Spanish, but didn’t speak a lot of Spanish at home – it was something I reclaimed by studying it in college,” says Parra, who is Chicana and a native of nearby Chula Vista, California. Now, she works with students who want fluency to be able to connect more with their families and communities. Parra shared with us how she ties the curricula to current events and builds lessons around the pop culture and music that students are passionate about.   

It takes a teacher to use the outside world for inspiration

As a relatively new teacher – previously an apprentice, she was hired on as a full-time Spanish instructor just two weeks before the start of the school term – Parra is keen to flex her creative muscles. Her students come from different grades, backgrounds and levels of fluency, which means she needs to create tailored curricula for each class.

Parra looks for inspiration outside the classroom to find projects that will help students learn to use Spanish in their daily lives. While reading the local newspaper, she came up with the idea to have her class produce a Spanish language paper that focuses on the upcoming local and national elections. The newspaper will be handed out to people celebrating Dia de Los Muertos, the traditional Mexican holiday honoring the dead, on Nov. 2.

“It’s the perfect project for a Spanish class because there’s a place for everyone,” Parra says – beginners and advanced students alike. “We’ll have opinion pieces and crossword puzzles.” She’s even working on getting local journalists to speak to her students about political coverage and satire, which will build upon the election theme.

Students like Nolan, one 10th grader, love Parra’s ability to weave culture into her lessons. “I mean, on the first day of school she played the guitar and sang mariachi for us,” Nolan says. “She loves the culture and is able to showcase the beauty of it in new clever ways every day.”

It takes a teacher to engage students with technology, pop culture and music

The school’s project-based learning environment and technology let Parra experiment with ideas that demand independent thinking and research. In mid-September, to highlight Mexican Independence Day, Parra led students in researching Mexican artists. Each student chose a person to highlight and used Chromebooks and Google Slides to make a presentation. “I had 50 students working on this at once – it was amazing,” she says.

Parra also uses music to engage students. During a brief stint as an apprentice humanities teacher last year, Parra noticed how often students listened to music during their breaks. She realized she could build a lesson around this passion that so many of her students shared. “The popular songs that students listen to were a great segue to starting conversations in the classroom about social movements, like Black Lives Matter,” says Parra. She created a series of posters with song lyrics that spoke to social change and asked groups to write their own songs highlighting a social issue.

“This is what I love about being here,” says Parra of the charter school’s philosophy, which encourages students to work independently and choose their own paths for learning. “I can give kids so much freedom.”

“What makes Ms.Parra a fantastic teacher is her personality and the way she explains things so it makes it way easier to understand,” says Bryce, a 9th grade Spanish student. “Ms.Parra is also one of the most sweetest, funniest, and most caring teachers I know. I’m really glad I got her as my teacher and I can't wait for more projects ahead.”

To connect with and learn from teachers like Arlene, join us for Education on Air on December 3rd.