Alphax College goes the Google Apps way, and happily so

More and more colleges around the country are going Google! The latest of the converts is Alphax College in Eldoret. We were there on the 20th of June for training of the students and the staff the ABCs of using google apps for education. For this training session, our projects programs manager, Limoke Oscar and Lead Web Developer and Deployment Specialist Musangi Meshack went to represent us. The two presented the below account of their sessions.

The reception to the college was warm and welcoming not to mention enthusiastic. We received a huge number of students and a commendable number of staff as well. As you can see from the picture below, the room was packed to capacity, in fact, some students had to sit outside but following the proceedings just as keenly.

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Our Projects Programs Manager taking the students through a presentation[/caption]

The morning session comprised mostly of the students and a few members of staff. We started with a presentation about the changing nature of education in Kenya and the importance of keeping up with the times. We took a direct approach to train the students which involves hands on use and demonstrations on the same.

There are many ways to gauge the level of understanding of your audience. One of the tested ways that we as PawaIT use is audience participation. We engaged the students in a Q and A session and to our delight, there were so many questions from the audience.

In summary, the students got to learn about all the features of Google Apps for education to name just a few, gmail, Google Drive, Google hangouts and Google calendar. We had a fun session working on the same document at the same time, enjoying a presentation with hangouts and creating a club website with Google (just a few of the highlights). We encouraged the students to embrace Google apps for education and use it to enhance their learning experience. For example, creating class calendars and sharing the events as well as the calendar with others, collaborating on a document for group assignments using Drive and creating simple websites through Google Sites.

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Our Deployment Specialist and Lead web developer taking students through Google Sites[/caption]

The management of Alphax College was impressed with our training sessions and hoped we would come back for more at the institution. As usual, we were more than willing to help the college develop other ICT learning solutions for example e-learning, a student portal where they can share learning material and an email retrieval portal, to name just a few.

If you are a learning institution in the country and would like to deploy Google apps, or have custom made ICT based solutions, then send us an email at pawait@pawait.co.ke and we will come meet you and discuss on how best to help your institution.