Rolling Out Google Classroom

It is already the third week of school! The days are flying by as I run around fixing tiny issues, resetting passwords, re-teaching how to set up grade   But, amongst the chaos, I have managed to get some teachers excited about Google Classroom!

Google Classroom is going to alleviate most of the trouble with document sharing, commenting and assigning grades to student work. It creates a folder in your drive for each assignment you give students. Their work gets turned into that folder, and not into your Incoming (or Shared with Me)drive. So, your Drive is neat and tidy! Plus, there is a stream where students can interact with each other and their teachers. Grades can be assigned through this stream too! It is almost like Edmodo meets Google Drive. A match made in Heaven?

I rolled out Google Classroom in a Thursday Tech Three email, which I have resurrected after a year’s break, but with a twist! Instead of throwing tools at the teachers each week,  I thought I would concentrate on promoting communication and collaboration between students and teachers that might reach beyond the classroom. The plans is to send out email each Thursday, with a screencast or quick tip to get teachers interested, then host mini sessions throughout our collaboration day (the one day my middle school doesn’t hold a formal team meeting during team time). It has worked out so well! Teachers come, after reading or listening to my Thursday Tech Three tip, then work together to figure out how the tool can improve communication or collaboration with students. This is the quick tip I shared with them. Google Classroom

We have been a #GAFE school for over 8 years, and still, some of the teachers are struggling to manage their documents inside Drive. I think it is because teachers like a clean surface, a clean desktop and everything sorted into their correct place. Up until now, some have been reluctant to share documents with students, and prefer to have them print them out and turn them old school style.

How do you, as a tech coach, roll out new initiatives? I would be interested to hear!

Creating Images to Capture Research

In the coming weeks, our school will be going on an outdoor Lorado Taft in Illinois. The students have all been assigned to a camp group with a name of a Native American tribe.
education trip to
Our Social Studies teacher wanted the students to do research on their tribe. That's where the librarian and I came in. Instead of just "fact finding", we encouraged the teacher to focus the students' research around an essential question. Then, look for evidence of character traits in the articles and then choose an image to represent the tribe based on the characteristics they found. Essentially, to do a short research project (a la Common Core) from one or two sources, and come up with an image to represent their tribe at Taft.

In this case, the essential question was "How did characteristics of Native American tribes vary depending on their geographical area? How does one tribe differ from another?"

The students used Google Drive to capture their research so that they could collaborate with their tribe members. Also, when we went to create the Tagxedo (Wordle like Web2.0 tool), they could paste their analysis and evidence of the characteristics of each tribe into the word box to generate for their image.

The students researched using World Book Online and Cengage Learning, both databases we have paid for a subscription.

Then, once the students read the articles, they came up with three characteristics that would best describe their tribe. Then they wrote an analysis of the evidence.

The evidence from their research and the analysis was copied and pasted into Tagxedo. (Silverlight 5 might need to be downloaded for the application to load.)

The image that the students wanted to represent their tribe was loaded into Tagxedo, they played with the colors and voila! a beautiful image to represent their tribe!

Each student in the tribe created an image that we saved to the shared student server. Then in their tribes, the students voted on the best image, and that image was printed and then will be taken to TAFT to represent the whole tribe during the outdoor education experience.

We were pleased with the outcome because:
1. The students used 1-2 well chosen sources to look answer their essential questions.
2. The usual "fact finding" was transformed into a valuable short research project.
3. The students needed to think about their tribe and chose an image carefully.
4. I loved that the images were not ALL printed, and the students could vote on the image that represented their tribe best. There were some heated discussions about the choice of images...indicating that the students chose their images with purpose.

If I was to change the project, I would allow the students more time for research and to discuss with the students how they were chosing their images. They went to Google Images and uploaded images. I would have liked to discuss in more depth where they could go to select images that were in the public domain.

Student Presentations: Oh my!

Every day in my school, students use Google Presentations to share their knowledge and to "tell facts" to their class. It is torturous for both students and teachers.

The teachers and I really wanted to challenge the students to give engaging presentations, where the audience is engaged and learning. Then, I remembered the keynote speeches I saw last summer.

I was fortunate enough to attend Building Learning Communities (#BLC13) Conference that Alan November puts on each year in Boston, last July. What struck me about the keynote speakers was that they taught us all kinds of things without the traditional presentation slides. In fact, they displayed amazingly engaging images and few words.

When I saw the educational visionairies present, I thought, this is exactly what I have been trying to describe to my students! So, it has been my mission this year to challenge the students at my school to transform their presentations. I won't lie, it has been an uphill battle!
When I explained the new process to the students, I showed them TED talks, Eli Pariser's on online filtering, partly because it was an engaging topic for 8th graders, but also because his talk was a great example of the style of presentation I was proposing.

The students discussed what they noticed about the slides, then the candance of Eli's talk, but also about the stage. Once I pointed it out, the students noticed the teleprompter in the floor.
From there, we came up with a plan to create two presentations in Google Drive.
One presentation was the "teleprompter" with all the words the students were going to share. The other one was the presentation that the audience would see, with engaging images and little to no text. Then, on presentation day, the students had the projector hooked up to one computer, then another laptop for their teleprompter.
The teachers and the students loved the process because it allowed to students to give their presentation confidently because they had their notes in front of them to refer to, and then the audience loved it because they were engaged in the visually stunning images.

We are working on moving from telling of facts to creating something new with their new found knowledge...baby steps.