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Learning with Pakistan

Over the past couple of weeks, I had the great privilege of visiting Pakistan, and working with over 120 teachers across Islamabad, Lahore and Karachi. Like a number of other countries across the Asia Pacific region, Pakistan is making changes to their education systems, with an increasing move to educational digitisation happening in the aftermath of the Covid pandemic. Schools that were thrown suddenly into using digital tools are now starting to rethink what this all means for education moving forward. Google is playing a significant role in this shift too, with Chromebooks and Workspace forming an important part of this new digital landscape, and working closely with Pakistan and other frontier markets across the region.

After flying into Islamabad via an extended 21 hour stopover in Doha, Qatar, I arrived at the first training venue to meet almost 40 enthusiastic teachers from the Beaconhouse Schools system. I was really impressed not only with their existing knowledge of Workspace, but also their solid understanding of contemporary pedagogical principles. These teachers were hand selected to be part of these workshops, and many of them were instructional coaches and very skilled educators. When working with teachers like this it can sometimes feel a bit intimidating, and at times I wondered if there was really anything of value I could add to the conversation, but I think we managed to find a number of areas where I was able to make a worthwhile contribution.

I was taken to dinner in Islamabad by Nishwa and Madiha from the Tech Valley team, where we enjoyed some great food and even better conversations. This was my first trip to a predominantly Muslim country, and I had a lot of questions about life, culture and Islam, which they were keen to answer and provide their perspective. I learned a lot and it was great to see the reality of the Muslim world instead of the ignorant stereotypes that we are often fed by the media.

After the second day of training finished in Islamabad we got in the car and drove the five hours to our next stop, Lahore. The team from Tech Valley did an amazing job of planning the itinerary, and it all ran very smoothly. In Lahore I was taken to dinner by Umar and Nishwa to Haveli Restaurant, overlooking the Walled City of Lahore, including the Badshahi Mosque, the Samadhi of Ranjit Singh, and the Lahore Fort. The food was great, the company was amazing, and the view was something else. Definitely one of those life experiences that gets burned into memory.

Working with the Lahori teachers the next day was an equally incredible experience, and again their deep understanding of the teaching and learning process made them a joy to work with. I’ve had the pleasure of working with thousands of teachers around the world over the past decade, and working with these Pakistan educators was a real highlight. We covered the same material as the first couple of days in Islamabad, with a few tweaks here and there based on feedback.

The workshops ran over two days, with the first day dealing mainly with toolset and skillset, and the second day focusing on mindset. I was happy with the structure of the two days, and impressed with the way these educators thoughtfully engaged with the workshop. I felt we had some really meaningful conversations about teaching and learning.

After the second day of workshops in Lahore I was able to have a couple of sightseeing days, and used some of this time to explore Lahore with my driver Saim. He showed me some truly amazing places, including the Shahi Hammam, and another visit to the Lahore Fort. The Fort is definitely worth a visit, and especially to see places like the Alamigiri Gate, the Picture Wall, the Sheesh Mahal (Palace of Mirrors) and the Naulakha Pavilion. For someone that had very little knowledge of the Mughal empire, I certainly learned a lot that day. It was the best kind of history lesson.

We finished the day with a drive to the Pakistan/India border. I honestly had no idea what to expect here, but I definitely did not expect what I saw. There are two stadiums on either side of the border, one enormous one for India and a smaller one for Pakistan, which collectively seat about 8000 people. Every afternoon a ceremony is performed where both countries parade, dance and perform in a display of power and taunting each other. It was quite incredible to watch and I’m so pleased I got to see it.

The next day I flew to Karachi for the final stop in my tour of Pakistan, I was met by the local Tech Valley team members, Sobia and Subhan, who were also amazing tour guides. We spent the afternoon visiting many interesting places around Karachi, including Frere Hall, the Mazar el Quaid mausoleum for Mohammed Ali Jinnah, Mohatta Palace, and then to an extraordinary dinner by the Arabian Sea at Kolachi.

I went for a walk near the hotel that morning and got mobbed by some street kids, begging for food as I passed by. It made me sad to see the levels of poverty that still exist in so many parts of the world so I bought a big bag of food to give them on my return walk. I know it seems tokenistic but I wanted to do something for these kids. As they laughed and acted up in front of my camera it really did strike me just how much children are children, anywhere in the world, in whatever conditions they find themselves. That innocence is so beautiful.

The final workshop in Karachi went well, and I was again struck by the professionalism and dedication of these teachers from Beaconhouse Schools. I again made some minor tweaks to the program based on feedback, and feel confident in saying that the Karachi workshop was also a success. It’s amazing what happens when you put talented educators together, provide them with some prompts and provocations, and watch what happens. I am certain that there will be big things coming from the people in these workshops, and I’ve no doubt they will play a key role in driving Pakistani education forward.

Overall, an amazing experience on many levels. Pakistan was eye-opening for me, and I suspect I will continue to learn and grow as I make further visits back there over the next few months.

If you’re interested, you can check out all the photos from the trip here on Google Photos.

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Foundation Fonts now in Workspace

If you don’t teach in Australia, it may surprise you to learn that we have specific fonts that must be used in early years and primary education. These fonts are mandated by each state and are a requirement for schools to use when creating resources for young students. The fonts are used when teaching handwriting to young students.

If you ARE an Australian teacher, particularly for the early years students from grades K to 3, but in primary school generally, you know that having access to these fonts is kind of a big deal. You are expected to use these fonts to make resources for students, such as worksheets and activities, so being able to install them on your computer is important.

For a very long time now, it’s been a bit of an issue that these mandated fonts have not been available in Google Docs. I don’t think I’ve ever run training for teachers where the question about Foundation Fonts in Docs has not been asked. It’s just one of those inevitable questions that comes up every single time, but until now there has not been a good answer. If you’re on a Windows or Mac machine you would need to leave Docs and switch to Word or some other tool to make student resources, and if you were using a Chromebook you were completely stuck since installing things like fonts is not an option for ChromeOS users. If you wanted to use Google Docs and you needed Foundation Font, you were just out of luck.

Until today. I’m very pleased to be able to tell you that the mandated fonts for all Australian states are now available in Google Workspace!

Let me tell you how to get them, and then share a little of the journey of how we got here.

To use these fonts you simply go to the font list, choose More fonts and search for the name of the font you want. These new Foundation/Beginner fonts have all been names with a consistent naming convention – Edu <state> <fontname>. So, for example, if you’re in New South Wales, just search for “NSW” and there it is. South Australians might find it a little trickier, as the letter combination “SA” appears in many other fonts, so you can also search using the term “Edu” and they will all show up. Here’s a video that shows what I mean…

How to get Australian fonts for schools in Google Docs.

Of course, if you do need to download these fonts so you can install them into a non-ChromeOS application like Word, Indesign, Illustrator, etc you can acccess them all in the Google Fonts collection at https://fonts.google.com/?query=edu.

There are a couple of companies that currently sell these fonts to Australian schools. I started conversations with these companies a couple of years ago to see if they would somehow partner with Google to help bring these fonts to the web so that Google Docs users could access them but there was very little appetite to do so. This approach of only selling installable fonts may have been a good approach in the 90s, but it was ignoring the rise of webfonts and the ever growing number of schools that use Google Docs, and particularly on Chromebooks.

Here’s a fun fact about fonts. When most people talk about “fonts” they really mean”typefaces”. If you’re unclear on the difference, a typeface is essentially the design of the text, or the way a piece of text looks, but a font is the implementation of that typeface in software. While a font can be legally protected by copyright, a typeface cannot. So anyone can freely duplicate an existing typeface, but there are intellectual property issues to consider when creating a font of those letters in software. This means that Google’s implementation of Foundation font is available for anyone to use, but only because it was created from scratch and not reusing someone else’s existing font.

Importantly then, these new fonts from Google have been completely reengineered from the ground up. The designers, Tina Anderson and Corey Anderson did a great job of making them for all Australian states, recoded these from scratch to create a new font for an existing typeface. And while you can buy these fonts from other sources, Google has made theirs available free of charge, both in Google Workspace and through Google Fonts.

As someone who has been training teachers in the Google ecosystem for over 10 years, the request for these mandated fonts was something I heard at almost every workshop I ever ran. I’m really glad that I was able to work with Dave and the awesome people in the Google Fonts team, and the designers Tina and Corey, to finally help bring these fonts to Australian teachers in Google Workspace.

And as a Chromebook user, and someone who passionately believes that the web is the future and that Chromebooks are the best option for most schools, I’m glad that we were able to remove this annoying font issue, and give teachers and students yet another reason to choose ChromeOS.

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Lost in Migration

16 years ago I started a podcast. It was an exciting time for educational technology. For those with long memories, you might recall that there was a huge shift taking place at the time in the way we use the internet, called Web 2.0. For those who were paying attention, this shift changed almost everything about the way we understood the web. It went from a one-way, information consumption experience to being a two-way, participatory experience that spawned a huge wave of ordinary people who were suddenly able to easily produce and publish their own content to the web. Around this time the world discovered blogs, wikis, podcasts, and all manner of innovative web tools designed to help anyone find their voice and connect with an audience.

I was curious to play in this new sandpit. Like many others, I started a blog, set up a wiki, signed up for every exciting new service that came along, like YouTube, Twitter and MySpace, and began to explore what this Web 2.0 shift was about, and as a teacher, how I might use it. They were exciting years for technology and for the ways in which educators were experimenting with these new tools.

It was 2006, and as part of this first wave of Web 2.0 users I wanted to try this new thing called podcasting. In a fit of enthusiasm, I opened up a tool called GarageBand on my recently purchased MacBook Pro, and started playing around with it. After lots of experimenting and playing around, I eventually figured out how to cobble together a system to record both ends of a Skype conversation, and then drop into GarageBand, add some music and effects and produce what I thought was a pretty cool end result.

I was teaching at a school in Canada at the time on a teaching exchange, and often found myself in interesting conversations with other teachers in the staffroom, talking about education, school, technology, and life in general. Inspired by this new possibility of podcasting I started to think that I could perhaps have similar conversations about teaching, with teachers from anywhere in the world, then record and publish them to the web. Much like the conversations around the staffroom table at work, I started to imagine how a podcast might be used to converse in one big global virtual staffroom.

Hence the Virtual Staffroom podcast was born. It began with a simple premise – to have conversations with leading teachers about technology in the classroom. Excited by the chance to learn something new, I delved into finding out more about the technical aspects of audio editing, figuring out RSS feeds and enclosures and how to publish and host these feeds, and then knocking together some graphics for my newly born podcast baby. Then on October 2, 2006, while still living in Toronto Canada, I published my first episode called Learning for Life, which was an interview with my friend Anne Baird back in Australia.

Thanks to the OzTeachers mailing list, at the time a vibrant and active online discussion forum for Australian educators, this first episode instantly found a receptive audience, and soon encouraged me to have a go at a second episode with another teaching friend back in Australia, Michael Cridland, called The New Web. I soon found there was no shortage of innovative educators who were keen to participate in this community podcasting experiment with me and so, almost by accident, I found myself off and running with what turned out to be one of the most successful Australian educational technology podcasts of its day. And while it happened to find a receptive audience who regularly told me how much they got out of listening to it, I can tell you that, for myself, being able to talk with so many incredibly innovative teachers from around the world was one of the most rewarding and enriching professional learning experiences I’ve ever been part of. I got to talk with a literal who’s who of brilliant educators sharing real stories of what happens in real classrooms. It was invigorating and exciting and creative and I loved doing it.

Chris Betcher at the microphone

Production of the Virtual Staffroom continued for some six years, until 2012. Episodes were sometimes published with a regularity that almost resembled a real schedule, and at other times episodes only appeared sporadically when I had time to make them. I didn’t stop producing the podcast for any particular reason, other than that I got busy and life just kept getting in the way. But I certainly missed doing it.

In case you don’t know how these things work, the audio files for a podcast need to be hosted somewhere, and the published feed enclosure just points to them. In my case, the audio files were hosted on server space I was renting from the same hosting provider where this blog is hosted, along with some other files and services. However, at one point, I’m guessing probably around 2014, I decided to upgrade my WordPress blog by migrating to a better hosting plan, and in the process I unknowingly lost the additional server storage space I was using, which included all the audio files for Virtual Staffroom! I didn’t notice for a while and when I finally realised that the audio links no longer worked, and then realised why, I nearly cried. It was devastating to realise that six years of work, some of the work that I was most proud of, were gone, permanently deleted from the GoDaddy servers,

I optimistically thought I had backups of these audio files, but I never managed to find them anywhere. Then a couple of weeks ago, I stumbled across some old portable drives and while combing through them I was elated to discover a backup of all the original Virtual Staffroom audio recordings, stored many folders deep in an old iTunes library backup. I’d resigned myself to the idea that I’d lost them all, so finding them after so many years was a wonderful surprise. I immediately set up an account with podcasting platform anchor.fm, uploaded them all, spent a couple of hours adding the metadata back, and then copied the embed codes back over the blog where they were originally linked. So everything is now back to normal (and of course, now backed up in several places!)

I know it might seem pointless to worry about recordings that are so old as to probably be irrelevant now. I’m well aware they probably don’t matter to anyone else, but they mattered to me.

More importantly, I was reminded of how much I enjoyed podcasting, how much I got from simply participating in the process, and also how much I realised that the work I’d done had been a positive thing for so many others at the time. And I still think the basic concept – conversations with leading teachers about technology in the classroom – is a worthwhile one. So I’ve decided that I’m going to do it again, and revive the podcast. The same basic concept, 10 years later, except with new stories to tell, new people to talk with, and new ideas to share.

So stay tuned. I’m looking for educators with stories and ideas to share. I believe the world needs to hear them. And if you’re a teacher interested in sharing your story, reach out. I’d love to talk with you.