Becoming Google Certified #1 How to get started

One of my proudest moments was being recognised as a Google Certified Teacher (GCT) at the New York Google Teacher Academy in 2012. I was the only person from Africa who attended and it was a WOW experience through and through.

But now I want to do all the Google Certifications and eventually become a Google Certified trainer. This page https://www.google.com/edu/training/get-certified/ shows all the steps that one needs to go through to get the Google Trainer Certification.

Google Basics
You start with the Basics and write the online exam. You have many chances to redo this I aam told and you need to get 80% to pass. Then you go on to the Advanced training and write the Google Educator Exams.  If you pass that you can try for the Google Certified Trainer.

Getting Started
To get started I visited https://www.google.com/edu/training/get-trained/ to see what was on offer.  You’ll see that nearly every Google application mentioned (and there are many) has three parts – Introduction/Basics/Advanced. Any time you want to understand a Google product this is the place to go.

For example I looked at Gmail. The Introduction includes a great video (http://goo.gl/Ppfgii)  given by Jenny Magiera who was at the Google Teacher Academy with me. She has since become a world-renowned speaker and presenter, one of my favourites. After watching that video which covers labels versus folders, filters and canned responses plus Google groups you are taken to the Google Basics training in Gmail (https://www.google.com/edu/training/get-trained/gmail/advanced.html)  This Gmail Basics has nine lessons with a self-checking quizz at the end.  From there it will take you to the Google Basics Curriculum for Gmail. After that you have several options one of which is to go on to the Advanced Gmail page and do the nine lessons for that.

Getting Certified
However the option that I am interested in is the getting certified option.  What this would require is doing all the required modules in the Basics curriculum and then writing the Basics exam online before proceeding to the next stage of Google Educator which requires writing more advanced exams. Finally one could go for the Google Certified Trainer which has its own requirements.

The lessons would be as follows:

One would then proceed to taking the online Google Basics exam which is a mixture of all these lessons.

Well, I’m pleased to announce that I  achieved my Google Basics Certificate in 2014 and am now working on the next level which is the Google Educator level which embraces the advanced tutorials.