Participatory Culture, Hybrid Reality, and the Digital Native: The Reality of our Learners

This past week we had the first of a series of Tech Cafes which allows for an informal setting to share ideas, both academic and practical, around the implementation of technology in the classroom. Our first session's topic was about the reality of our learners as digital natives and how this might be reflected in our classroom practices. The description for the session was:

"In an attempt to better understand our students and how their understanding of the world is different than that of the digital immigrant, I will share some of the foundational insights I have gained during the course of my degree in Digital Experience Innovation."

Following is the recording from the session. Because this was a session about technology we of course had technical issues. The quality of the video is not great, but I have tried to splice in the slides during the worst of it. The camera has since been retired as a pile of plastic shards.

Gallery Tour Feed Back

A particular challenge that I face as an English teacher, which is further exacerbated by technology, is getting students out of their desks and moving around. I decided this week to incorporate some movement into my class while still using the available technology.

My Grade 10 academic students are working on creating an advertisement for a not-for-profit organization known as Give Them Light. This charity came to their attention after we watched the film Blood Brother. Students were tasked with completing some inquiry questions on what makes a good ad completed through the analysis of not-for-profit advertising focussing on the same issues depicted in the film. Students were then challenged to create their own advertisement for Give Them Light by connecting their analysis, our work on logic, and the character virtues they have been assigned to explore.

To get them out of their seats, students were put in groups and assigned a section of chalkboard in the room. Here the groups identified the success criteria for an effective ad. After 5 minutes, students rotated around the room looking at what other groups had identified. As a class we then co-created a Google Doc listing the most common aspects from the various lists.

We then went to the computer lab (I was monopolizing tech this day). Students pulled up their advertisements on the computer screen and left their device (iPad or Chromebook) on the desk in front open to a blank Google Doc. The class then rotated around the room providing feedback to students based on the success criteria identified in class. This allowed for a great amount of feedback in a short amount of time. Not only did each person receive feedback from 26 people, but they were able to see what others had done in order to learn what they could change in their ad to make it stronger. Finally, the success criteria we created allows me to better tailor my rubric to their understanding of the material covered in class, allowing for a more authentic assessment of what was learned, not what I thought they might learn.

This type of gallery tour could also be easily recreated online without the necessity of two computers each. Simply create and share a Google Slideshow, allow students to upload their ad to a slide, and then use the commenting or speaker notes functionality to do a virtual tour and have students provide feedback.

The physical gallery tour did allow students to get up and move around and also created a bit of excitement as students would group around particularly strong ads and comment out loud.

Google Classroom- Six Week Progress Report

As our students receive their week-six interim report cards, I think it's also time to assess my first six weeks with Google Classroom.

Achievement- Satisfactory

Strengths

• Classroom is a much nicer user interface than Google Drive previously provided.
• The real-time nature of Classroom's Stream provides a valuable way to share learning goals with attached media and documents.
• This is particularly useful for teachers who are in a one-to-one device environment, as well as for students who are absent on a particular day.
• The Assignment functionality within Stream makes giving and receiving assignments of all
  types of media easy, as well as makes checking progress a one click task.
• The "Students" page allows for easy email communication between the teacher and students.
• The "About" page allows for easy setup of course material for which students need regular access.
• The ability to share Announcements and Assignments with multiple "Classrooms" improves workflow and cuts down on copying.
• The user interface makes it easy for students to find what they are suppose to be looking for. There are no distractions, just the work and information a teacher wants them to have.
• The tight integration with Google Apps For Education is the only key differentiator of this product and unless a teacher fully integrates Google into their classroom, Classroom may not have broad enough appeal to be useful to him/her.

Weaknesses

• There is NO WAY to share your Classroom Stream with people outside of your GAFE domain. 
• For me, one of the greatest benefits of the connected classroom has been the ability to keep parents informed about what is happening in their child's course with little effort actually required on my part. Classroom does not allow this.
• Privacy concerns can be dealt with easily by removing user names from the view of people outside of the GAFE domain. This is no excuse for putting my course in a black box!
• Even if I wanted to show my colleagues how I am using Classroom I can't unless I add them as a student (which means they show up as incomplete assignments) or I log in and show them. The inability to allow Student Success teachers access makes supporting my students much more difficult.
• Classroom needs an automatic "Notebook" folder created for students.
• Much like how the teacher can set an assignment to "Make a Copy for Each Student", attaching documents to an Announcement needs the same functionality. One of my classes still refer to a handout given on September 4th, which requires several pages of scrolling to access. Hoping students will "make a copy" of information sheets and file them properly is not terribly practical.
• The real-time nature of Classroom can cause problems. There have been numerous times when Classroom has not been available or is extremely slow to load.

• Although occasionally this is the fault of the wifi hub, there have been many times over the past six weeks where I have not been able to access the Stream or Assignments despite having robust wifi.
• Customizability is extremely limited.
• The inability to rearrange the order of Announcements within the Stream or the About page may require you to delete and repost items if you need to add something extra.
• The About page, or side bars of Stream, would be infinitely more valuable if you were able to add gadgets like Calendar, in order to provide easy access for students. Unless it is in their face or you stand over them, many will not remember to check a second site for the class calendar.
• Classroom seems to have been designed by people who were trying to remember what their teacher did when they were students.
• The inability to attach documents to a student's assignment submission is frustrating. If a student has turned in their written work, there is no way for the teacher to attach a video of their presentation after the fact.
• There is no way to create Announcement or Assignment posts ahead of time. This creates extra steps and documents if a teacher needs or wants to plan ahead. 
• On a picky note, Google calling their service "Classroom" makes it very difficult to talk about in and outside of class. Telling students to go to Classroom, or submit it in Classroom has already lead to some confusion.

Next Steps

• Create a "Notebook" functionality as mentioned above.
• Allow outsiders a way to see what is going on in Classroom. 
• Give the teacher the option to break down the black box.
• Improve server support. 
• Many times I see the "Oops! This is taking longer than it should" message. This message only means something if it doesn't appear more often than not.
• Allow for greater customization. 
• Even the ability to change font size within the Announcements would be a vast improvement. Students can't read what an Announcement says if Classroom is on the Smart Board.
• Create some reusability functionality in order to make Classroom useful to a teacher teaching the course a second time. 
• I would suggest being able to reverse the timeline when a course is done to allow easy reference the next semester/year.
• Maintain a positive attitude, Classroom. You have made excellent first steps, but the only way to learn how to do better is to listen and act upon the feedback from your teachers.

Google Docs- Decentralizing Learning with Comments

With the deployment of a one-to-one environment in my classes this year, a goal of mine is to remove myself from the centre of the classroom. I want to decentralize the learning environment so I am no longer the only source of course content. In the first few weeks I have found some amazing uses of Google apps to put the learning and student voice at the centre of the classroom.

Decentralizing Learning- Google Docs and Commenting

To change the focus from a teacher espousing knowledge and content, to the content and learning itself, I have had some great success with Google Docs. As part of our grade 10 academic English course, students study logic and rhetoric. One of the primary focusses is on their ability to identify 19 logical fallacies in literature and the world outside of school. What follows is my workflow in creating the space for student voice to help their classmates develop a better understanding of logical fallacies.

1. Using our paper handout of Fallacies in Logic, I scanned the document to a .pdf, uploaded it to Google Drive, and "Open[ed] with" Google Docs. This created an OCR scanned and editable document that digitized the handout with few corrections necessary.
2. The Logical Fallacies Google Doc was then attached to an announcement of the "Learning Goals" for the day on Google Classroom. In the sharing privileges, the Doc was set to be available to anyone with the link in our district (only people using the school administered Google Ed accounts) with privileges set to "Can Comment".
3. While I was at the front of the class providing explanations and examples of each of the 19 fallacies, the entire class was encouraged to highlight a fallacy and add a comment providing a further explanation, the teacher's example, their own example, or a question.

After class was over, I reviewed the comments on the Doc and was amazed to see what was happening while I was teaching. There was almost no example of students copying my examples or definitions verbatim, but a conversation with additional examples (most much better than mine, embarrassingly enough) and students building off each others' examples had occurred. The students were able to learn and share their understanding of the fallacies in real-time and in a way that I could not replicate on my own.

The Inconsistent App- Google Docs

Image: http://www.bestappsite.com

Having used the "assignment" function of Google Classroom for the first time yesterday, I am, at this point, impressed with the ease at which it seems to work (not being able to set assessment with a rubric notwithstanding). Each student received their Google Doc assignment sheet in their folder, which they can edit and then submit. The part that I am most happy with is that students can also add other Drive files or attachments. For me, this means that students will be able to submit their planning and thinking work, as well as a video recording of their actual presentation.

Where things breakdown is in the Google Docs app for iOS. The assignment sheet given contained a few charts (created in Google Docs) which students needed to fill in to show their thinking. What we learned today is that the Docs app does not support the tables created in its own program. It shows up as an unsupported item.

The work-around seems to be opening the document in the iOS Chrome browser where it is editable. This is both frustrating and confusing. Why bother with the app if the browser has more functionality?

First day in class with Classroom

The day is finally upon us and I just finished teaching three classes with Classroom integration. I thought I would comment on a few practical points that myself and a few of my colleagues have noticed about Classroom.

1. Although I realize that the intent of Classroom is to have students access it from their own devices, I am annoyed that the font is so small that students cannot read what is on Classroom when it is on the smart board. The ability to change font size is a must.
2. I also ran into the problem that I know is going to be the most challenging, students needing their Google Ed email accounts. All of my grade tens knew their account info, but only a handful of my grade twelves remembered. I requested their login information two weeks ago, but our Google admin, like most I am sure, is completely overwhelmed this time of year. The required Ed accounts also means that I cannot share what I am doing in my class with parents!!
3. A few of my colleagues have also noted that not being able to create drafts of posts makes planning a class much more difficult.

At this point, Classroom is creating more hurdles than it is helping. I have had to make all documents editable by anyone with the link and send students to that link through other avenues because without their Ed account, they can't even see the stream.

Tomorrow we will be co-constructing some documents. At this point I think I am going to have to work completely outside of Classroom to make it work.

"About"

It is amazing to already see some of the changes that Google is making with Classroom. The additional features are making organizing my courses this semester much easier. Here are three things that I am pleased to see today.

First, the "About" page for each course provides an easy way for me to add all of the first-day-boring-waste-of-paper sheets that students are required to have easy access to. Also, the "About" page allows students quick access to a centralized G-Drive folder and my email address. This makes life much simpler.

Second, my Google admin created a course so that I could see a course from the student side (a function that should be built in to classroom, much like Blogger's ability to "view blog"). On the student page it looks to be one click on a classmates name will allow you to send them an email. This should greatly improve communication and collaboration in the class.

Third, when posting an announcement to a Classroom, you can choose to post that announcement to as many or as few of the Classrooms that you are running. For me this means that if there is an alternate schedule for the day, a reminder of a special day at school, or a need to let students know I am going to be absent, this can all be done with one announcement instead of having to update each Classroom individually. Very pleased.

More to come, including what I think is still missing from Classroom by Google.

It Begins!!!

It looks like my problem of not being able to access Classroom has been resolved by my Google Admin. She did have to activate the app and informed me that it could take up to 24 hours for it to become live.

I have spent about 30 minutes exploring and so far everything seems to meet the expectations set in the teaser video, but nothing to wow me yet. Here are a few of the things I have noticed so far.

1) The home screen is set up like an social media news feed and allows two options for teachers. You can either add an "announcement" or an "assignment" to the feed. When adding an assignment you can choose whether you want to the students to view, edit, or receive a copy in their drive. What is missing is the ability to collaborate on an announcement. If I wanted to work on a document with my students in real-time, I would have to post it as an assignment, even though it is not.

2) I am very glad to see that there is a pin provided so that students can add the course themselves, as I have always found adding students via their email address to be a frustrating experience. There is the option to add students yourself though, if you prefer.

3) Problem #1. I decided I wanted to look at Classroom from the student side so I tried to add my personal gmail account as a student. I was informed "You cannot add students outside your domain to courses". I believe this means that all of my students must be using their ED account assigned to them by the school board. For me this could already signal the death knell for Classroom. Here is why:

a) We have one Google admin at our board and every September she is overwhelmed with requests for student passwords because many of my students use personal accounts at school instead; which they should. Why would you want to keep logging off and on as a different user all of the time? There is no longer a division between work and personal and there should not be one at school (unless students would prefer. They should have the choice).
b) When a student joins my class from a different school board it will take several days to get them hooked up with an ED account. If I am going to run my entire course on Classroom, this is a major barrier.
c) Google apps are great because they allow for decentralization. This student sign-up procedure forces centralization again. Frustratingly similar to what I feel is wrong with D2L. I have autonomy in my physical classroom, let me have autonomy in my virtual Classroom!

4) Looks and feels light and airy, not overwhelming with buried material like other learning platforms I have used.

5) When you want to make an announcement on your wall, it is very easy to add files from your computer or Drive. Two frustrations I can foresee is that you cannot access files that have been shared with you on your Drive, which means you have to leave Classroom, go to Drive, add the shared file to your Drive, and then go back to classroom. Especially frustrating if you are trying to quickly share exemplars of student work or materials shared by a teaching partner (this will lead to multiple versions of a file). Also, there is no way to quickly add a video or audio announcement. Being able to access your webcam and leave messages in seconds would be amazing and something I had hoped to see.

6) Last comment for today. Assessing assignments looks exactly like it did in the promo video which is disappointing and does not reflect best practices. We mark using a 4 level, 4 category rubric. Classroom allows you to select how many "points" an assignment is worth or leave it as no assessment. I need to be able to attach a rubric as an assessment tool, both when the assignment is given and when it is assessed. Also, the ability for me to record video or audio commentary would allow for better and quicker feedback.

If you are listening Google, please don't make me leave Classroom to upload files to then go back to Classroom to attach them to the proper assignment and/or student!!  

So far Classroom appears to be a basic resource for a teacher to post assignments and announcements that allows for easy access to Drive. I do feel that the forced centralization is a major concern, as well as a seemingly unclear sharing/collaboration process. Also, it seems that the purpose of Classroom is to be a resource for students at home and not really a learning hub to be used during class. Perhaps my hopes do not align with Google's vision.

More to be seen and explored.

In the beginning

As of yesterday, I have access to Google's new Classroom application. I am very excited to begin this journey, but thought I would start with an introduction of myself before I begin to explore what Google Classroom has to offer.

I am a secondary school teacher in Stratford, Ontario, Canada. I am in my tenth year of teaching and in my sixth school. I have been at Stratford Central for the last four years and it has been somewhat of a dream. We are a high achieving, publicly funded high school, with very few behaviour issues, which makes classroom management a simple task in comparison to many other schools.

This coming school year, I will be completing my last three semesters of my Masters degree in Digital Experience Innovation from the University of Waterloo. With this added demand, my Principal has given me an excellent schedule; I will be teaching 3 sections of academic grade 10 English and 3 sections of grade 12 college level English.

Starting this fall I will also be in a one-to-one device environment. I will have full time access to 17 iPads and 10 Chromebooks. With the reduced number of preps and the access to technology my goal this year is to be completely paperless by using Google Classroom as my starting point and to take advantage of Turnitin.com (and a variety of other sites) to help facilitate assessment.

Over the next year I will be posting about the rewards and challenges of Google Classroom, as well as any tips or tricks I pick up on the way. If you are reading this and have any questions or comments, please do not hesitate to post.

Thanks and enjoy your summer!