1. Meetings – A presentation tonight on Special Education referred to how the ARD meetings can be audio recorded and then give the participants a tape copy of the meeting. Now this is a district that serves a community that may not have Internet or even computer access in the home. So I can see why tape would be a necessary requirement. But what if Google Voice could record and transcribe the message of the meeting? Do you need audio of the entire meeting or could a summary at the end be the recorded message? I mean, how many people actually listen to the entire taped archive of the meeting? Is this something to listen to in my car while driving?

What if at the end of the ARD process meeting, the summary and major points were dictated via Google Voice. GV then transcribes the message and mails it. I know the tech isn’t there yet for perfect transcription but it’s pretty good. Especially if the voice sending the message is clear and speaking slowly as such a summary could be. A meeting itself may have too many voices going on at once and that could cause problems.

Apply this to any meeting and you can have a transcribed summary in your inbox before you get back to your desk?!

Actually, if you have an iPhone with 3.0 installed and VoiceRecorder, you can record the entire conversation and email it as an attachment. It might be too big of a file so I don’t see the point of archiving an entire conversation. But again, summarize and points of agreement by all in the group could be a good start. How about recording board meetings? I wish it could transcribe all that!

Perhaps in the future (and I know this is in development), the system will achieve voice recognition and tagging capability so that archived sound bytes are searchable….

Yep…it’s coming!

2. Security and Crisis Management – If I programmed a GV account to be the one number to contact all principals, security, and maintenance folk who needed to be in the loop should a crisis occur; then the system should contact all these people via email, text, and/or phone to any of their phones we have in the system. One call. One number. One message. Information sent instantly to all stakeholders who need it and sent to all their message systems at the same time. Seems like something to consider, right?

3. Work Orders – Our technology office could have the one number be our WO contact system for requests. I wonder if I could create GV account and then embed the phone badge on our website. If anyone is experiencing a technology emergency, they can call the one number and leave a message which is transcribed to all of our accounts at the same time. If anyone is in the local area, they can take care of the request. The system then archives all the requests as messages so we can still track them as work orders. Do you think this would work (or should)?

So…whaddya think? Possible? Impossible? Too much of a stretch? Too late for me to be up???

I shared with them my vision for migrating resources to the web and the justification for why. I explained the differences of office tools, operating systems, and the push for online assessments. I also shared various resources found in social bookmarking and sharing collaborative spaces in Google documents. I kept my eyes on them to make sure I wasn’t going overboard or extending beyond what they were understanding; but they were all on board. I went for 90 minutes and even answered questions.

I left that group today with some great responses! They want to learn more and that is the best response!

They also would like to get more youthful representation in the HCCC. I may get together with my computer teachers at the middle through high school to see if there is some shared interest.

And they would like to help with a project I have in mind to get older computers out to the community. We have a huge recycling problem in this world when it comes to our computers. Instead of thrusting them out to third world dumping grounds, we could strip them down and put Ubuntu on them for Internet access in our community. The HCCC is interested in helping with this project and I welcome their help!

Anyway, it was a great time today to share with another group in this great community. I feel so blessed to be able to go out and share within our community about our ideas and to hear feedback on what we can do to improve our vision. I don’t know of many technology directors who are so willing to go out and connect to their community resources! I wish more of my colleagues would do this. Step out of your offices and into the community that may or may not be your “target” audience. Share. Collaborate. Learn.

And HCCC – I already have some ideas for your new website! Let’s keep talking!

I haven’t even made it past the Table of Contents yet because it is bursting with so many goodies on just the back cover. A giant cartoon cloud on white with the word “Cloud” in it and a new logo that simply says “g OS”. And this website – http://www.thinkgos.com as its message.

The magazine is actually Linux Pro (direct link to the Special Edition on Google Tools) and it has a boot-able CD in the front jacket that allows me to run the Google Toolset without installing the entire OS on my computer. The instructions say that this new OS is “based on Ubuntu Linux 8.04″.

So is Google releasing an operating system??

Why not?! Well, I don’t think it is an operating system like what most would consider an OS. An operating system in its purest sense is one that allows the user to interact with the operations on the computer. But for Google, their operating system is housed online! The cloud is the OS! So the device doesn’t matter.

We saw this coming when they released their own browser! Chrome was the first generation of their own operating system. They extended their resources beyond a web page to the frontier of the browser itself. Now they supply the tools needed to access resources online without the limitation of the hard drive.

And yet we keep buying machines with keyboards, mice, and monitors….

The rest of the magazine contains articles on all the great Google tools out there: Documents, Calendar, Groups, Reader, Chart, Earth, Sky, Sketchup, Picasa, Purchasing, Sites, Blogger, Maps, and some of their desktop gadgets as well. It is BURSTING with resources for Cloud computing!

I highly recommend it. I don’t think this Google-thing is going away any time soon! And while the rain clouds in Kerrville turned out to be false hopes today, the Cloud remains a possibility for many applications we use day to day.

Check out the magazine. Darn! That book I purchased is now under a pile of magazine must-reads.

*Note: After reading the info on the G-OS website, I discovered that it isn’t a Google OS nor is it created by Google. The G stands for “Good” and it is a Linux-based OS that uses Google tools. Still….it is pretty cool to think about.