Towards the end of Term 4 2016, after two unsuccessful attempts to sign up to Google Classroom, I was almost ready to give up. But after chatting to an old uni friend Jo Crowther I learnt some important information about how to get started. Information EVERYONE should know about.
But so far, it’s been 100% worth it! Background Our Grade 5s are fully 1:1 with iPads with only about 8 students out of 100 not having their own device from home. Nevertheless, all are able to access an iPad. This makes it really easy to run lessons using any space within the school. Each Class can be accessed by me (ICT teacher) & students Classroom Teacher. And although we are still really only in the trial phase of introducing Google Apps across the Grade 4s-6s, there’s been a lot of success already. We have 3 teachers teaching specialist ICT, which in a way has worked out well as one of us is teaching one of the year levels of 4,5 &6. It’s been great to try it together, and now our enthusiasm is catching as some of the classroom teachers are beginning to use it also. Here’s 5 reasons why you should consider doing it.
Here's an example.
2. Student Engagement Enabling students to have a direct line of communication to a teacher presented heaps of possibilities. I could also hear some of my colleagues voicing their concerns about being able to be contacted. But when my iPad goes off with a notification on classroom of a student asking a question, I think it is the best thing ever. Imagine a student, keen to continue learning at home but hits a roadblock and can’t find the answer. Before, that student would need to wait all night and hope to catch me during the day to find the answer. Their interest levels might even disappear in that time. Now, all they need to do is ask a question on the task & I will be notified. If I see it, I can answer it right away. 3. Students not missing out! Yesterday, team teaching with a Grade 5 teacher, he showed me his laptop and said ‘check this out.’ A student from his grade who was away had sent him evidence of completing the Maths task set during the day. She even emailed it to him! It was such a powerful moment for me & some reassurance that the point of setting up Google Apps (enabling flipped learning) is slowly starting to work! 4. More time Furthermore, I have set a goal to be able to create every lesson for Term 3 ahead of time. The ability to schedule assignments in Google Classroom will mean that I can push out each new lessons the night before the lesson. Although it will take time to create the lessons, in the long run I’m investing in my work life balance for Term 3. I will have no planning as such as the lessons will already be ready to go out ahead of time. For the Grade 5 & 6 team, one teacher could also push out learning materials for everyone else in the team, thus saving time for others. 5. Collaboration We have a Grade 6 Tech Team at school, who are helping develop some initiatives at school. One of which is to create a QR Code “Hunt” for our Special Friends Day. Watching them create the Slide Deck together is really cool. How they’re problem solving, discussing and questioning each other on a task they are all engaged in is really interesting. Having students work on a shared slide deck, where they can comment on each others work is encouraging positive Digital Citizenship and reinforcing positive online interactions. 6. Powering up Gamification Coinciding with all my Classes, I’ve trialed running a Fictional Game behind the learning via the idea of Gamification. Long story short, if students choose to play they enter the Academy of Creativity & Imagination. Here, they are striving to become Agents who will fight against a group of Creatures hell bent on hijacking students creativity skills. Students can move through the ranks of the Academy to become Agents by finishing class work. When they do, they earn XP. The more XP they earn, the higher they move in rank. To try and encourage more students to participate, this term I decided to post a series of Puzzles online. If students can crack the code, they earn extra XP but also unlock a part of my Gamified Website called a Side Mission. Students can then carry out a Creative task that gives them more XP. For the first Puzzle, I asked students to Crack a Secret Code. The first 13 students who did are now Secret Agents. They’ve been told to keep their identities hidden from the other students, which has created this really cool interest in the other students to try and find out who they are. At the moment, students are trying to figure out who they are to unlock the next Side Mission. Classroom has really enhanced this because students can ask me questions online or submit the answer they think is right. I’ve been able to give them instant feedback and clues that continues to hook them into the Game, and therefore the learning that takes place in lessons.
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Since 2015, I have been convinced that technology is the answer to making teachers lives easier. There is so much talk of not enough time & being overworked! I'm not arguing that it's not true. My gripe with this talk of no time and workload is that not enough of us actually do anything about it other than complain about it. Last year, my argument within my ACHPER presentation about the challenge of creating a culture within a school that has an embedded whole school approach to health PE is that it is near on impossible to create one because of the workload of a classroom teacher. And whilst we can champion it and recruit others to the cause will help create this culture, the real answer is using technological tools to better manage our time more effectively.
"Great idea Crowy!" some will see. "But when will I get the time to do be able to learn how to use these tools?" #SIGH We have to make time. We have to invest it out of hours. Just like we invest money into a savings account. The pay off won't be instantaneous. But in the future, that small time investment of our time will open up hours and hours of time in the future. Yesterday, a friend of mine showed how powerful investing time to explore technology can be. And it is an absolute game changer. It is why I'm writing this at 6am on a Saturday morning. Our whole staff is going to benefit from this enormously. Before I explain how, let me give you some back story. I am probably lucky that in my first year of teaching, our Leadership Team decided to become a pilot school in this new thing called a PLC (Professional Learning Community). It was huge in America, but new in Australia. That was nearly 7 years ago we started doing it. And 5 years down the track we were the 2nd school in Australia to be recognised as a PLC. Pretty cool, considering how many schools in Victoria are becoming PLC's now. A big part of PLC is collaboration. And one thing we have been doing for three years is use Google Docs for planning. Every Year Level Team has time set aside within the timetable to plan for next weeks lessons together. Each teacher is able to write into the same document at the same time. This is fantastic, as all the resources are in the one spot with any links and information we will need. However, for all its benefits, we have noticed that it has inadvertently caused a few productivity issues.
There is just TOO many documents! Over the course of 18 months, I can remember 3 clear instances where I have shown staff examples of how powerful docs, slides, forms and sheets can be. In hindsight, they probably weren't presented clearly. And I should have known from my writing about a whole school approach to PE, people have so many other things happening that it's hard to get excited about something you don't know about, or don't initially see the benefit of. And again, many peoples answer to these suggestions of the best way to learn how to use them is to play around themselves is: “I don’t have the time to figure that out or do it because I’m so busy”. Until yesterday, when someone did it! A friend of mine had been playing around with putting the planner into a Google Sheet. Having looked over it yesterday, a number of things struck me that were better than what we are doing currently.
I hope from this now other staff members will see how beneficial investing time into technology will reap rewards for them in the future. Those few nights my colleague put into developing this new document will save her hours every week. Add that up over the year and that’s huge. All it took was a bit of work in the beginning. And it clearly illustrates that complaining about our workload gets us nowhere. Being proactive about finding ways to save us time on administrative tasks through technology is going to help solve the problem of teacher workload. |
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