Greetings, Ladies and Gentlemen
As we continue through this technological blog, there will be instances in which I will recommend a website for educators to use to help improve their ability to teach. These websites that I recommend are websites that I encourage you to cache for future retrieval. With that said, let's take a look at our first website to cache!
One of the least enjoyable aspects of being a teacher
pertains to the fact that we must sometimes invest our own income in order to
support our classroom practices and teaching strategies. From my experience,
there are two reasons why we are put into a position where it is required that
we do so:
1. School District Contracts and Exclusivity Purchasing
Rights from companies who “bid” for the right to offer their products to the
district staff.
Purchasing pencils and erasers for a classroom is not as
simple as visiting Wal-Mart, buying several boxes of both, keeping the receipt,
and being reimbursed by the school district. Throughout the nation, school districts are
teaming up with specific companies that earn the right to exclusively sell
their products to teachers if teachers do not want to spend their own money on
buying school supplies. Since these businesses have entered into fiscal
partnerships with school districts, these companies get to decide which
versions of their products will be allowed to be purchased for school related
purposes. These same companies decided what prices to charge as well.
2. A teacher may be required to fill out ordering paperwork
several weeks before the supplies will be needed. It takes a considerable
amount of time to visit a school technology specialist (sometimes this may be a
secretary), obtain the necessary order forms, complete the order forms, submit
the order forms, and then wait for the supplies to arrive.
In a perfect world, all teachers are aware of all of the
materials in their classrooms so that actions can be taken to re-stock on items
that are running low. Unfortunately, while many teachers actively plan lessons
several days and weeks in advanced, the actual teaching strategies implemented
in the classroom are based on the needs of the students, the teacher, and the
on-the-spot decisions that are made in order to facilitate learning. A teacher
may change her/his plan to teach a given lesson but may not have the resources
immediately available in the classroom to make the desired changes.
In order to help reduce the amount of paper work to
implement lesson activities while simultaneously cutting down on the costs of
managing a classroom, I want to spotlight a fantastic resource that teachers
can use to collect formative assessment. This resource is none other than Google
Documents.
To use Google Documents, a teacher needs the following
resources:
- School WiFi
- Computers (laptops or desktops), tablets, and/or Smart
Phones for the teacher and for one student in each established group
Using Google Documents is a fantastic method to gather
formative assessment from students that is quick, easy, and free. All a teacher
must do is create a template for the desired activity, make the link sharable
to all members of the class, and then let the students have access to the
sharable link that allows members to edit the document that has been created.
When students use a Google document that has been created
for the purpose of formative assessment, the teacher and students can see the
document being updated in a real-time format. This allows each formative
assessment activity to tell a story rather than an ending; students will begin
typing their responses, make changes to their responses as a result of seeing
other student responses (if the teacher decides to let students see all group
responses), and then finalize their responses that can then be quickly
discussed by the teacher and students during the activity debrief.
As an example of the power of Google Documents, consider the
following activity that I implemented in my Science Methods course that I teach
to future elementary school teachers.
At the end of the activity, I have a permanent record of my
students’ responses that I can easily file away in a digital cloud storage
device and/or print out to share will all students in all sections of the
course under consideration. This allows me to forever refer to student
misconceptions of content, determine if students answer questions in the same
regardless of cohort under consideration, and reflect on my teaching whenever I
need to make changes to improve student learning.
After an investigation in which six different student groups
performed an investigation about which environment worms preferred to live (Wet
Soil vs. Dry Soil, Soil with Food vs. Soil with No Food, Dark Environments vs.
Light Environments, Soil vs. Sand, Warm Soil vs. Cool Soil, Soil with Smooth
Textures vs. Soil with Rough Textures), I wanted the students to share their
findings so that each student group could use classroom data to determine the ideal
environment in which a worm preferred to live. Based on data collected from all
groups, which was shared to the class using Google Documents, each student
group could come up definitive conclusions that could be discussed out loud in
class. This would eventually lead to the construction of an actual worm
environment in which students would perform tests and collect data to support
to their claim of the ideal worm environment. Some of the results are shown
below:
Based on the information contained in the activity, I could
quickly determine that all groups were drawing the same conclusions regarding
the ideal worm environment(notice how some groups like to have fun with the activity by typing silly information that does not necessarily impeded the learning taking place).
Consider the alternative method in which a similar activity
would be implemented in a traditional classroom. Students would be divided into
groups of two or three, each group would be given one or two markers (that will
eventually be depleted), and one or two easel sheets (a packet of easel paper
is approximately $15.00 for one hundred sheets) to record their answers. While
easel sheets are large and easy to read, a teacher could quickly go through a significant
portion of allocated SEEK money (if the teacher is even given any) just for the
purposes of collecting student data to help monitor student progress in the
classroom. Depending on the amount of group activities that the teacher uses on
a weekly basis, the teacher may be required to continuously fill out forms
throughout the school year and wait for the products to arrive in time for a
teacher’s lessons or the teacher will have to make personal purchases on an
as-needed basis.
In all honesty, I am new to Google Documents (I have only
started using it since the beginning of September), so I have not even had the
chance to explore all of the ways in which it can be used to facilitate student
learning. However, I am overly impressed with the student response, the ease of
creating activities, and the data that I have already collected. While the
documents and activities that I have implemented in my classes are intended for
data sharing, group reflections, and the development of ideas, the uses of
Google Documents are not only limited to activities that require writing.
Google Documents allows students to make drawings, create tables, create
spreadsheets, create graphs, presentations, and even allows the option to embed
recorded and live media.
While I am a fan of easel paper, white-boards, and dry erase
markers, I am definitely converting into the digital age when it comes to
sharing content with my students, and allowing them to participate in group
activities that allow me to quickly collect and organize a large amount of
formative assessment data.
With all of that said, if you have any experiences using
Google Documents and/or can provide examples of how it is used in your own
classroom, please comment in the area below. I am wanting to learn of the
different strategies in which I can use Google Documents to enhance the
classroom experience in ways that are free and require a minimal amount of
preparation time.
Goodbye order forms. Goodbye purchase orders. Goodbye
waiting time. Hello to more of my paycheck that can be used for non-work
related items. Maybe this time...I can...CASH out!
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