Mandate Update- PD Funding and Grants

I wanted to take a minute and update the mandate of this blog. Although the primary focus will still the integration of Google Classroom and GAFE into a one-to-one device classroom, I have recently been approved for two PD grants that will become part of this blog.

The first is a grant distributed by the Ontario Teacher's Federation. The approved proposal is comprised of a multi-disciplinary team of teachers from my school including science, computer engineering, Canadian World Studied, Food and Nutrition, and English. We will be using the funds to purchase key devices that will facilitate the integration of other, board provided technologies into the classroom. We hope to provide some valuable insight which will be published on this blog and on the OTF website.

I was also approved for school board sponsored PD to work with a teacher from a different school in our board. We will be investigating the use of GAFE to better allow for collaboration between students and teachers in a decentralized, highly independent learning situation, like an Interdisciplinary Studies Course, or during Independent Study projects. As suggested by my Principal, we may also look at how this could form the basis for asynchronous professional learning communities among staff throughout the
board and province.

I am very excited to tackle these new projects and hope that they will create valuable resources to be shared here.

Thanks for reading!

Adobe Voice is iPad Magic

If you are looking for an app that makes the purchase of an iPad worth while, look no further than Adobe Voice. Not only is this app simple enough for young children to use, but it is versatile enough that one of my Master's classmates uses it with great success; and it's FREE!

The App

The app is a very simple presentation creator which not only allows you to attach images, photos, or text, but also voice recordings to each slide. The app has a great variety of good looking themes, easy to use templates, and background music. Here is a video that shows the app in action.

Why it is AMAZING?

This app allows weaker or younger students to follow different types of stories which prompt them what to put on each slide. It also allows more advanced students to create presentations from scratch.

How I'm Using it.

I have been using Adobe Voice with my grade 10 English students while studying poetry. We have been working on developing deductive arguments. My students have been struggling with connecting textual support to their topic sentence/thesis. With poetry they work at identifying the purpose of a poem inductively and then trying to explain the purpose deductively. Instead of having them write their analysis, which they don't want to do and i'd rather not read, they create an Adobe Voice presentation in the same or less time that it would take them to write the paragraph. It is far more engaging and easier to share with the class.

My colleague was also very impressed with Adobe Voice after she used it with a very low functioning grade 9 English class. The students are reading at a grade 3-5 level and have a very difficult time sharing their ideas. They were able to use Adobe Voice after only a short introduction and created a presentation in less than an hour. This has allowed the students to be successful in an area that they have experienced little success in the past.

Update

The current version of Adobe Voice will now allow you to download the video to your iPad to then be used and shared in any way you like.

Five Things You Should Know Before Using Google Classroom

If you are considering using Google Classroom as a part of your courses, here are five essential things you will want to know.

1. Google Classroom is a black box

Maintaining regular communication with parents is a constant challenge for teachers. Other online platforms I have used in the past made the arduous task of keeping 80+ parents informed on what is going on in their child's class a simple task. I could send parents a link the my course calendar, website, or wiki and that was the end of my effort. Google Classroom does not allow this to happen. You won't even be able to share Classroom with your colleagues or student success teachers without adding them as a student. I understand that privacy is the central driver behind this policy, but in my opinion, this will prevent Classroom from receiving mass adoption.

2. Google Classroom is not a course management system.

If you are looking for a place to set up units and prepare folders of resources ahead of time, Google Classroom is not for you; Google Drive is definitely for you, but not Google Classroom. Drive will allow you to set up files for units and plan resources ahead of time. If you want your students to have access to all of your files from day one you can share the folder with your students. You could share the folder on Classroom, but do not think of Classroom as a course website, but rather as a Facebook news feed or a Google stream.

3. Google Classroom is all about the here and now.

Google Classroom's Stream will make it easy for students to find exactly what they need for a particular moment in time. The teacher needs to update the Stream often so that the relevant information for class that day is at the top of the stream, ready to go. If you are in a one-to-one device environment, this can help simplify your day significantly.

This focus on the present can also cause issues. If, like me, you are planning on using Google Classroom daily you may find the format of the Stream frustrating. Throughout a unit I will provide information sheets and links that students need to access throughout the next couple of weeks. This information quickly gets pushed down the stream and ends up requiring scrolling and page refreshing (which has recently resulted in the page automatically scrolling all of the way to the top) to find exactly what a student needs. Students could "make a copy" of each information sheet, or copy links into their bookmarks, but in reality, this will almost never happen.

4. Assessment in Google Classroom will not work for everyone.

My single biggest frustration, and one of the key selling feature of Classroom, is its handling of assessment files. What I do like is that you are able to send assignment sheets to students with only a few clicks and that you can send a copy of that assignment to each student where it is stored in a folder in their Drive.

The key issue I have is that evaluating the work when it is finished is tailored to a very specific form of assessment. The built in assessment functionality only lets you mark the assignment based on an overall average or point system. Our school system marks with a 4 category, 5 scale rubric. There is no way to set a rubric as a marking schema, and if you do not attach the rubric when you originally create the assignment (perhaps you are co-creating your rubric with the students) you are not able to edit the assignment and add the rubric with the option of giving it to every student.

If, like in my department, you have students hand in work, provide feedback for improvement (without a mark), and then give students time to make changes and resubmit for summative marking, your assignment inbox in Classroom will become a disaster. Material will be listed as done, returned, and resubmitted. Because of this, my ability to comment or add items to their assignment sheets becomes a mixed up mess of commenting and 'making suggestions'. A little more versatility and the ability for teachers to end an assignment would make assessment much more functional for many teachers. 

5. Google Classroom's usefulness is dependent on your use of Google Apps for Education.

If you find that you use a wide range of websites, online tools, and applications, you may find Google Classroom is just another site you need to maintain. But, if you use Google Docs as well as the many other Google Apps, Google Classroom is the place for you. The ease of sharing Docs assignment sheets with each of your students and the ability to easily track who has submitted what and when by looking at the submission history, makes this a great tool. It also makes it very easy to share course content, whether it be a youtube video, a link to a webpage, or a variety of handouts and slideshows. Students will have no good excuse for not finding everything they need.

The Fine Line Between Awesome and Creepy

It has finally happened!! My ten promised Chromebooks arrived yesterday and I deployed them in class today. During my period two class, students actually cheered, despite having never used a Chromebook before, to be rid of their iPad.

I have to say that at this point I am very impressed, if not a little creeped out. The Chromebook starts up in seconds (even faster than my Macbook Pro) and takes you directly to a log in page to input your Google credentials (which then logs you into all of your Google apps). Once I was logged in I immediately went to the browser and started entering the web address for Classroom. The browser auto-completed the search with my previous web browsing history . . . from my personal computer. Did I mention it did this in a fraction of a second? Almost creepy fast. Kind of makes me wonder if I should be logging out of my Google account regularly instead of just staying signed in.

The ease at which the students took to using the Chromebooks was like a breath of fresh air in comparison to our fighting with the iPads over the last two weeks. To be fair, I am trying to implement all Google products on the iPads, but still, it was a very good day.

Several of my students, upon finding out the price of a Chromebook, are now seriously considering buying one of their own. Now to see if they stand-up against the teenage hoards.

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!