Activity 4- Google Suite

20% time: First week ideas

The above link is for the first week of using 20% in college prep.  It is mainly ideas from another educator's webpage, but customized for our use.  Rather than referring back to the webpage, I thought it would be easier to have it in a working document that can be used and shared by everyone teaching college prep courses.  We are still working on determining if this is the way that we want to go or if we just use more of a "Genius Hour" idea.

• How will you use your Google Drive in your teaching practice?
• I will use Google Drive for all documents that are going to and from my students this year. With Chromebooks in the classroom and use of Google classroom, it will provide my students and me with the ability to easily access all of the information. Plus, I really like that it saves in real time and I can go back and see revision history for the "I swear I did it. I don't know how it got deleted" problem.
• How could cloud computing be a useful tool in your classroom?  
• I think it can be very beneficial by allowing more individual student feedback and attempting to go paperless. It will allow me to send students feedback on their progress and/or final projects that I can do from home instead of one on one. Plus, I don't have to worry about hauling paper around and having a student claim that I must have lost it.
• What are the pros and cons of using it with students?
• Many of my thoughts are listed in my previous statements, but I feel the biggest con that I have right now is that I am worried about staying on top of the organization of it all. My own drive gets disorganized quickly without many students sharing things with me. Also, I am a little worried about having students with an organization system in their own Drive. I plan on ensuring that all of my students set up a seperate folder in their drive for just my class. It is the modern way of students buying notebooks and folders for each class.

Screencasting

I have done screen-casting in the past and find it very valuable for the idea of staff training and/or student use to demonstrate understanding.  This is a video I made with SMART record to help our staff understand how to use the mastery manager online test option.  I plan on doing a follow-up version to show how to send results out via our school email.  The only thing I need to figure out now is how to get a test-safe browser onto the Chromebooks to prevent students from opening new tabs during their test- if you have any ideas, I would love to know.

Engagement

I have done some of the other options for this assignment in my classes; therefore, I chose to do the Movenote. I was thinking that this would be a great tool for flipping some of my classes and getting content out very quickly. I always struggle when it is a big lecture day in class because I feel that I am working harder than my students (plus, I commonly get frustrated by dealing with inappropriate behavior as I am trying to teach). This gives me the options to have students watch the lecture at home; use the Chromebooks and headphones in class, and/or have a review session without having students stay after school. I really like this option and feel that it will provide the opening of time in-class for more hands on activities.

My only issue that I had with this site was that it wouldn't allow me to just insert my presentation from google slides.  I had to save it to my device as a pdf first and then post it.  It works great now that I know, but it appears that this shouldn't be the only option.  Just a heads up to anyone else struggling with it.

Why we need to teach geography...

I always enjoy showing this video to my classes at the beginning of the year.  This year, I may have my students do some pre-learning by looking up the answers to some of the questions even before they watch the video.

The way I see using blogs in my class are to share information with other teachers and the students.  In reality, it could easily replace the traditional webpages that we currently use.  This for the parents combined with the use of google classroom for students and teachers...is there any wonder why some feel that google is taking over the world?  The question becomes, when will education be mostly done through the internet?

Kickoff:

• What motivated you to become a tech nerd this summer?
• I want to never be complacent.  I want to continually learn the next and greatest thing for my students.  Things change so quickly.  I want to try and stay in front of it all.
• What you hope to learn about in Tech Nerd Camp 2.0?
• I hope to learn tools that will supplement my instruction and allow my students to learn and demonstrate learning in fun and creative ways in my class.
• How would you describe your current comfort level with technology?  What tools do you use already in your classroom (if any)?
• I feel very comfortable with the current tools that I use; however, I want to learn new tools.
• Currently, I use the following (to name a few)
• Flipboard
• Google sites
• Google classroom
• Kahoot
• Socrative
• Storyboardthat
• Pear Deck