Why NOT Google Classroom

What it is...

Google Classroom, a new feature in the Google Apps for Educators suite, has streamlined the use of digital tools in a traditional/blended learning environment.  

It replaces the need for individual teacher course websites for announcements and links to online content by creating a clean streamlined user experience for teachers and students.  

Additionally, it provides file sharing capabilities; once only available to intermediate/advanced G.A.F.E. users who were familiar with  the various scripts and add-ons that now support your Google Drive Applications; such as Doctopus.

What you'll miss...

Advanced users who migrate to Google Classroom will miss the ability to customize the appearance and layout of their online classroom. 

Also, Google Classroom lacks certain file sharing settings that make differentiation and group projects/jigsaw activities possible via other bulk file sharing processes.

The biggest drawback is the lack of a rubric option that accomplishes standards based grading; a-la' Goobric.  You can still use Doctopus to "slurp" in assignments from Classroom and attach Goobrics, but this seems like more "teching" than should be necessary to accomplish this task.

So it's bad?

I highly recommend Google Classroom for teachers taking the first step toward digitizing their classroom.  Teachers who lack the expertise, time, or may be intimidated by attempting to design their own website will immediately be able to jump into this very user friendly system.  Oh, and there is "an app for that" that allows you to access your classroom on the go.  

Additionally, teachers who have never, or previously tried and then grew frustrated with, bulk file sharing management systems can easily easily accomplish this task.  In fact, this feature in Google Classroom is more refined, in terms of setting due dates, and communicating with students about specific files, then I have previously seen; though at the cost of rubric integration.

  

A Step Back?

For advanced users, I would say yes.  While Google Classroom offers an amazing student/teacher experience; it does so at the level of "substitution/augmentation" on the SAMR model.  While it is classroom online, it is not an "online classroom".  

It is a private environment, lacking the outward facing component that early G.A.F.E. adopters may be used to.  Google Classroom shuts the door on teachers ability to share content and best practices with the world.  Accordingly, students can communicate, collaborate  and share their products of learning with each other; but not with the world. 

Google Classroom may be a good first step toward climbing the SAMR model, but the streamlined interface leaves little room for customization and innovation.  Google Classroom should be seen as a stepping stone, and not a target for best digital teaching practice.    

  

Election Day PD

Election Day PD

Today is election day, and while most schools are sitting in boring meetings, wondering why they are here and the students are not, at the School of Awesome, our PD is worthwhile and inspiring.

Today we are doing some work around identity, and where we are from. We are leveraging this reflection to make better connections to each other, and our students.

I will be updating this post (and Tweeting @cambrianed) throughout the day with thoughts, photos and reflections,

Where I'm From 

If I told you I was a teacher at “The School of Awesome”, 

would you know where I’m from?

Where I’m from, I hear the sounds of students being ushered to class 

by a bowl that sings and the encouraging words of faculty and staff. 

I see the faces of students, happy and sad, 

tired and awake, engaged and disenfranchised. 

I feel supported, nurtured, protected, safe, and inspired 

and work so as hard as I do so that they can say the same.

Where They (Our Students) Are From

 

• How can visiting student’s neighborhoods help us better understand our students? 
• What do I hope to gain from this experience?
• How can my students benefit from this?

Science Team Walkabout in Central Harlem

Search #HudsonHomes on Twitter

Some Reflections

• My discomfort with being a tourist in my own city was obvious, not just because I would be walking the streets of neighborhoods that I otherwise would avoid, but because the lens that I was given was to observe measures of quality of life that I knowingly take for granted…
• We walked through areas of Harlem that were as sanitary, cosmopolitan, and  cooperate as anyplace in the world, blocks away from places that were comparably  as raw, urban and gritty as others.
• I observed men as old as their 50s openly and casually consuming marijuana in the street.  This rattled my prudish sensibilities on the subject, but thought that this behavior was more symbolic than my superficial glance in their direction could tell me.  The men almost seemed empowered by this act and I wonder in what way this influences the community.

Forensics Online -- Blended Learning

"The days of a class full of students working on the same thing at the same time is over."

~Someone Smart~

Therefore, I am starting to dip my toe into a true blended learning course. 

Check it out at Cambrianed.com.

Students  will use the site above to access content. 

All products of learning will be posted to the students personal outward facing online portfolio.

Portfolio infrastructure courtesy of SiteMaestro 

Stay tuned for updates and reflections.