Aim to Be Awesome, Not Perfect

This week I got the opportunity to present whole-group professional development to the teachers on my campus. I know that we have a lot of different levels of technology savvy, so I wanted to differentiate. My focus was on student creation (since we are working toward becoming a Fine Arts Academy) and my goal was for everyone to learn at least one new assessment idea for their class. In order to reach everyone, and give them something they could reference,  I created a Google Site.  For the beginners, I created a Google basics section. This group had their own space. It had stations with checklists for some of the basic productivity skills in Google Calendar, Drive, Gmail and Docs. Teachers would go to whichever station they felt they needed help with. There were instructional videos and step-by-step instructions, all of which was also included on the site. I was very fortunate that two of our campus instructional coaches offered to be the facilitators for those stations. I...

     So as part of my new-ish job, I am trying to learn and practice new strategies so that I can share them with teachers.  Since I am a former math teacher, I practice with math lessons I used to teach. One of the new things I have been learning about is Hyperdocs . I highly recommend you click on that link and learn more about them! Also, you should check out this episode of the Google Teacher Tribe podcast where they talk about Hyperdocs! I am really impressed how they are taking student- directed learning to a whole new level.  I have done something like it before (see my Probability Slides assignment  or my Proportional/Non-Proportional slides assignment ) but I hadn't ever thought of including all the student work in the same document! Anyway, I had to start playing.  I started with my Proportional/Non-Proportional assignment and turned it into this Hyperdoc . I was definitely impressed with how much more engaging the hyperdoc looked. ...

So how do you get started with Google Apps for Education? One way to get started is to use Google Forms for a simple formative assessment.  Take a worksheet and turn it in to a Google Form. Copy the information into each question box and copy the answer choices into the form as well. Below are pictures of the worksheet and the Google Form. You can set the form as a quiz and it will grade it for you!  Once kids are done, Google Forms will give you data about the responses.  You can even open the data in Google Sheets to review! 

Technology can be scary, especially if you are someone who doesn't use it often or it seems like it always has an error when you use it.  But it can be a great teaching tool - it can engage students and possibly make your life a little easier.   So, if you want to start small, start with Google Docs.  Have students work in Google Docs - whether they are taking notes, typing a paper, or gathering information -  rather than writing on paper or tying in Microsoft Word.   Here is an example of something my daughter did in 4th grade in Google Docs.   If you are feeling brave, create a folder in your Google Drive and share it with the students.  Have them turn their files into the folder, rather than print.