Thank you Google

Google as a company sometimes gets a bad press. Prying eyes looking at our every message, financial motivation and the environmental impact of servers around the world hosting our data… it can sometimes seem as though they’re only in the business for themselves. But...

I’ve been using Google services with my current school for 6 or so years and, to be honest, the only reason we moved across to Google was that we would get emails for free. A few weeks after the move from our Exchange server, Google docs were discovered by a few of us and proliferated at such a rate that we all soon felt deluged and almost unable to cope. There then came a period of calm; we were getting used to GAfE (Google Apps for Education, as it was then called). Training on GDrive, managing role accounts, induction of new staff, removing our central servers and committing to Chrome all contributed to a solid infrastructure with a capable and eager staff. A few years after that came Google Classroom to replace a creaking system that had really run its course.

And now, 5 or 6 years later, we have found ourselves as a school, a city (KL), a country (Malaysia), a world in really challenging times.

Earlier this week our school took the painful decision to close due to coronavirus fears. The government duly followed suit the next day forcing Malaysia to undergo a “restriction of movement’ until the end of March. Overnight we then heard that the UK government had cancelled all of the UK public examinations causing much consternation in the international community..

With such unprecedented events taking place, we could have fallen over multiple times. Only we haven’t. Our staff - our talented, committed, determined, ever-learning staff - have taken like ducks to water with virtual learning using Google Classroom and increasingly Google Meet. The former has been simply an extension of what we’ve been doing for the past few years… offering students resources, videos, quizzes and feeding back to them electronically. The latter has given us the all-important face-to-face connection with individuals… showing them that in troubled times their teachers are still there for them, still care about them and will find the time to support them academically and pastorally. 

Over the past few days our SLT has had to meet virtually to discuss major decisions, sensitive communications needed agreement, and feedback has been required from all our constituent groups - students, parents and staff. All of this has been made utterly seamless through the use of Google docs, sheets and forms.

And we’ve all done this relatively easily. Google has designed an infrastructure that has equipped us with tools that have made our job in these troubled times so much easier. And for that, I’d like to say a deep, genuine and heartfelt thank you to Google.