Still the beginning of 2020 and we have many project and platform updates for you! Read all about them in our first 2020 Newsletter!

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This is the first Go-Lab newsletter after the Next-Lab project. On February 13th, 2020, the final review of the Next-Lab project took place in Luxembourg. The result of the review was that Next-Lab has been fully approved by the commission. The reviewers were impressed by the Go-Lab ecosystem and what has been achieved in the project. We are very much aware that this success of Go-Lab is also the result of the creative work of so many teachers world-wide, so, thank you for that! This also means that the Next-lab project will formally end soon, but the Go-Lab initiative is continuing with the secured commitment of the Go-Lab consortium, as well as through the ongoing H2020 GO-GA innovation action and other projects. This also means that there will be more upcoming Go-Lab features of which a few are now announced in this newsletter.


 

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It has been announced a few times, but now the Go-Lab collaboration facility is online. You could already use SpeakUp for more advanced forms of collaboration, including discussion, voting and the like, but the Go-Lab collaboration app enables students to share apps and labs and a simple chat function can be added to this. What you need to do is to add the Collaboration app to your ILS. When you open this app, you can compose groups of students, just enter names (or see and use the nicknames students have used to login to the ILS) and drag them to groups. Now, enable the apps and labs that you want to be collaborative (an option for this is in the apps and labs configuration). This is it. Students will now see each other’s mouse and actions. If you add the Chat app also to your ILS, students can chat with each other in the groups you have created in the Collaboration app. Most of the apps are now collaboration ready, but from the labs, currently only the Electrical Circuit lab is currently ready for collaboration. We are working on more labs and we will keep you updated on this and other news.


 

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Some of you may have used already the Go-Lab offline facilities. These were created to handle situations in which schools have low bandwidth or no internet at all. Many labs and a selected set of apps are ready for offline use; these are indicated with the “offline” symbol at Golabz. Until now, you had to include a special offline version of the apps to enable an offline ILS, but we have now changed that so that when in Graasp you indicate that the ILS is for offline use, automatically the right version of the apps are used. More information about offline ILSs can be found here.


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In Graasp, we have now included a new feature that helps you manage your class through multiple sessions. You can now “freeze” sign ups in an ILS, meaning that at some point in time you can prevent access of new students to the ILS. In other words, you can encourage your students to stick with the chosen nickname. This is especially useful when you take advantage of our multiple learning analytics apps. For doing so, go to the Sharing tab in your ILS in Graasp and tick the “Freeze sign ups” box.


 

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We also like to remind you of the 2020 Go-Lab summer school in Greece that will be held 5-10 July 2020. Join us and work together with colleagues and the Go-Lab team to build ILSs, exchange ideas and realize exciting scenarios on how to use ILSs in your classroom. Participation in the summer school can be sponsored through the Erasmus+ KA1 programme. You can find more information about the course and how to apply for Erasmus+ funding on the summer school website. Registration is already open: Register now to reserve your spot at the Go-Lab Summer School 2020!


Finally, we are always interested to start new projects, certainly also together with school and teacher organizations. For example, if you know a sponsor who likes to support the co-creation of ILSs geared towards your curriculum, pls let us know and we will apply together.

Best regards and much Go-Lab fun!

Ton de Jong

Tuesday, 10. March 2020