Week Three Personal Post - Updated 1/29/18
This week's tech challenge is going to be moving my class - slowly - to Google work.
Our school went to iPad's six years ago, with little direction for implementation, but much encouragement and enthusiasm from administrators and teachers. Some eager teachers went paperless, moving to Moodle, Showbie, and Schoology, while some reluctant teachers balked at adopting ebooks to replace textbooks.
My adoption included an increase in writing workshops and conferencing, as students were now bringing a word processor to class each day, and to a paperless system of weekly agendas and posted assignments.
Our school uses Plusportals, and I have been posting my weekly agenda there for the past six years. This allows me to send the agenda to students and parents at the start of each week, especially helpful for students or parents who need to improve their awareness of the coursework.
But this semester, I will begin linking my students to the agendas folder in my Google Drive. We are required to work through Plusportals, so I will have redundancy, but from now on, when I email out my agendas, I'll be sending recipients to a link to the document where I store it.
The benefit here goes back to a time-honored reason some teachers are reluctant to make an post agendas. Many of my colleagues insist that a daily/weekly agenda is untenable as the daily and weekly plans can go awry. Pausing only briefly to ponder what that might imply about curriculum design and implementation, I'm excited to test my easily-edited agendas on Google Drive, where my students and their parents will have access to an updated document every time I edit it.
This way, instead of parents and students having to learn that there is some variation between what I hope will happen, or be due, on Friday, and what I posted Monday, the new storage and access technique will provide students and parents with up-to-the-minute plans and assignments.
If you've made it this far through the post, come back soon, and I will have added a video showing how this looks from the teacher's side and the students' side.
Have a great week!
HERE'S THE PROMISED VIDEO - linked!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NS217X721ek&t=105s
Our school went to iPad's six years ago, with little direction for implementation, but much encouragement and enthusiasm from administrators and teachers. Some eager teachers went paperless, moving to Moodle, Showbie, and Schoology, while some reluctant teachers balked at adopting ebooks to replace textbooks.
My adoption included an increase in writing workshops and conferencing, as students were now bringing a word processor to class each day, and to a paperless system of weekly agendas and posted assignments.
Our school uses Plusportals, and I have been posting my weekly agenda there for the past six years. This allows me to send the agenda to students and parents at the start of each week, especially helpful for students or parents who need to improve their awareness of the coursework.
But this semester, I will begin linking my students to the agendas folder in my Google Drive. We are required to work through Plusportals, so I will have redundancy, but from now on, when I email out my agendas, I'll be sending recipients to a link to the document where I store it.
The benefit here goes back to a time-honored reason some teachers are reluctant to make an post agendas. Many of my colleagues insist that a daily/weekly agenda is untenable as the daily and weekly plans can go awry. Pausing only briefly to ponder what that might imply about curriculum design and implementation, I'm excited to test my easily-edited agendas on Google Drive, where my students and their parents will have access to an updated document every time I edit it.
This way, instead of parents and students having to learn that there is some variation between what I hope will happen, or be due, on Friday, and what I posted Monday, the new storage and access technique will provide students and parents with up-to-the-minute plans and assignments.
If you've made it this far through the post, come back soon, and I will have added a video showing how this looks from the teacher's side and the students' side.
Have a great week!
HERE'S THE PROMISED VIDEO - linked!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NS217X721ek&t=105s
Hey Kyle - we went to "required" online agendas this year, and honestly, while useful, it is one more chore to accomplish each week. We post assignments on PowerSchool, on the board, and now on our websites. Seems redundant sometimes. One thing I do love about the agendas though is that they are update-able in real time (like Google Drive). And I also like having a record of what I've done in months (or years) past. Next year I will be bale to track class progress by comparing agendas form one year to the next. I'll check back for the video- thanks!
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