This past week in our Ed Tech class, the passionate teacher-and-tech-enthusiast Pete Pasque came in and spoke to us budding teachers on how to make smart use of technology with our students. During his talk, entitled “Growing Digital: Grassroots Google Integration for Staff and Students," he shared many valuable web resources with us to help us communicate with our students, collaborate and get organized. His organization ideas for students and for teachers really sparked my interest!
At a local high school, every student develops a Google site in their freshman year, which acts as an organizer of all of their school assignments. These assignments are Google Docs and are linked to the individual student's website and shared with their teacher. I loved this idea! On a personal level, I have been having an increasingly difficult time organizing my grad student life, my student teaching life and my personal life in a coherent way. Last week, when I really couldn't take it anymore, I began to deconstruct the moat of binders, books, loose-leaf paper containing valuable field notes and scraps of papers with To Do lists scratched on them which surrounded my work area. I'm happy to say that my work area has remained "relatively" clean since then. However, what about organizing the academic work I complete at UM and for my student teaching placement?
Pete pointed out to us that sites such as Moodle and Edline are limited in their ability to service teachers and students, since students can post their assignments, but are not given access to said documents on those sites after the academic year is over. Additionally, what happens if your computer crashes? If you don't keep paper copies of all your work, does that mean that you lose all evidence of your academic growth? As someone who has had a hard drive crash, this last question really resonated with me...
So... what's the solution? Personal Google sites with good privacy settings! Pete, and the rest of the staff as this local high school, are working to teach their students organization of their academic work, as well as providing them with a portal so that their work is enduring and accessible!! A good example of the necessity of this came recently from my mentor teacher. She was telling her AP Chemistry classes that they needed to keep hard copies of their completed labs and lab reports, because colleges often require students with AP credits to still take the entry-level lab. Their reasoning: AP labs aren't equivalent to college-level labs (...and they lose out on tuition money). My mentor teacher asked her students to take their lab reports to the college 's Chemistry Department and advocate for themselves, since the labs her students complete are college-level and require strategy, lab skills and writing ability.... The application?: I could suggest to my mentor teacher (and to the students) that her students could create Google Docs for each of their labs and lab reports, which would give each student another set of documents, from which they could draw should the need arise when they head off to college!
I look forward to talking with my mentor teacher about the utility of these ideas in a science classroom and also considering how I could implement them in my future school.
Things to consider would include:
1. What access to computers and the internet do each of my students have?
2. What kind of planning would be required? How much time will I need at the beginning of the year to set this norm in motion with my students?
3. Could I get others in my department (or even the whole school) to consider implementing a similar policy?
Additionally, it would be interesting to extend the idea for student-use of Google sites (and maybe he did this for us during his talk, but I'm not remembering right now) to help students to create resumes and keep track of their activities, awards and accomplishments. It seems that this idea would definitely require some collaboration with the guidance office and/or other staff in order to make it an effective means of organization for the students.
Finally, Pete shared a number of other resources that I plan to explore in the days ahead. These included:
o bit.ly
o Remind101
Check them out!
No comments:
Post a Comment