- Why creating rosters will help you organize your assignment workflow
- How to use different Google tools for creating rosters
- How to assign work to your students
- What strategies are available for managing assignments
- The importance of providing feedback to students
- Different strategies for giving student feedback
This might be may favorite unit thus far. My MA work is primarily in Educational Technology, so bringing the classroom alive, and making it portable are two key things I am trying to do in my first year of teaching. To do so, it is recommended by this unit to make use of Groups, Sheets, Drive, and Classroom.
Groups are part of Gmail, and something many of us have probably made use of - add Contacts to a Group to make contacting that much quicker instead of searching through to find everyone each time. as a teacher, I can make a group using the school accounts of the students in my classes and label the groups Period 1, etc., to make sending a reminder easier, and to make sure I don't leave anyone out when trying to send a note out in a hurry. As a bonus, the Groups show up in other contact lists throughout Google Apps. So if you are using Classroom, you can invite a Group to a Classroom, and you've just saved yourself more time! Students can also use a code, so if you want to add someone to the Classroom but not to the normal Group, you can do that too. There is a limit to the number of teachers (20) and members (1000) to a classroom. I would not exceed that limit in my normal use, but it does allow for some epic online-cross-classroom discussion.
Classroom will let you create an assignment, share it to the appropriate students (which will send a notification to students that haven't turned them off), collect it, grade it, and return it. For those of us trying to get away from paper, and trying to make the most of the technology we have access to, this is a great way to reinforce that students should continue to check your Classroom, and interact with their teachers, and other students through it. I also love Drive, and reinforcing to students to create projects through it so they don't lose them. If students are working in a group, I can check who has participated in the completion (unless there was an agreement to do research and someone else did all the typing). also, when a student submits an assignment to be graded, it becomes locked for editing until the teacher grades it.
Editing, and providing feedback through comments is easy and it is not as intrusive as it sounds. A created suggested edit will appear like a highlighted section with a comment to the side. Comments can be replied to in case clarification or discussion is needed. Once a comment is taken care of, it can be resolved and it is removed from the view. It is not removed from the document because it becomes part of the history. This is a huge bonus for a teacher in case students are being inappropriate or suggesting they provided feedback but it was deleted. The average student should not pose a problem, but the history does allow for behavior management if needed or necessary, and can be a learning experience for students thinking they are just "having fun" at someone else's expense.
Even not using Classroom, Drive and Docs can keep an English classroom busy without losing papers. I've accidentally renamed a file instead of making a copy, and written over the same paper three times, only to learn I later needed to resubmit all papers in one document. I was able to use the revision history to find ALL the papers I had typed in the same document, make copies at the appropriate history and save all of my work for a semester. Using it for my own needs has made me more confident in helping my students as well.
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