After returning from the GAFE Summit this year, Vanessa was feeling a bit overwhelmed however was committed to trying GAFE in her classroom. That following week she introduced her class to Google Classroom and Socrative. Here is what she said about the experience:
"I've just started my google classrooms and I had NO idea how receptive students would be. They LOVE it! They actually raced to begin their assignments online; I've never seen that before! I conducted my first Socrative Quiz today and they loved this too. It really was a new experience seeing kids educationally engaged on their phones and the feedback I got was all positive. I also wanted to add that I actually had students thank me for creating the google classroom. These are kids who are notorious for not handing work in and losing assignments. They love the fact that they never have to hand in another piece of paper and that they have an alternate method for submitting their work. "
This year the Grad Transitions Class has moved its entire course into a Google Classroom. While still in the process of registering all 200+ grads, this new format gives both teachers the ability to view and track student work and progress, post assignments and examples, and give feedback when needed. It also gives students the ability to submit their projects digitally, easily contact their teachers for assistance, and access examples and instructions on any internet-enabled device. Grad Transitions has also changed their process by creating assignments/projects that are more personalized to each student. Google classroom also compliments this change by allowing students to upload and submit a variety of project formats (Slides, Prezi, Docs, YouTube Videos, etc).
I wanted to share Caroline's experience recently with a grade 10 class to demonstrate how a task as simple as saving a document is changing among our students. Caroline recently had her class complete a class project, a component of which was to create a presentation (either in PowerPoint or Google Slides). Everything went well until it was time for students to submit their presentations to Caroline for assessment. Caroline brought her trusty USB stick with her to the computer lab and asked students to simply pass it around and save the project to it. Unfortunately is wasn't that simple. Most students responded with "Can't I just share this with you?" or "Is there a place I can just drop the file?". This surprised Caroline, who thought this was going to be an easy task and now found herself teaching students not only how to safely eject a USB drive but also how and where to plug it in.
The reason I share this story is that it perfectly demonstrates how technology is changing for our students and how in the very near future asking them to save to a USB stick will be the same as asking them to save to a 3.5" floppy disk - pointless. At the end of the day, it will be our students that drive our need to change in terms of technology.
GAFE doesn't have to be limited to classroom use! Our MD Rowing team has been using Google Forms to complete athlete registration (a very big job in rowing), keep track of payments and jersey deposits, collect parent emails and contact information, create team lists and even collect information for clothing orders. Not only is all this information organized into easy to read Google spreadsheets but it is also shared among all coaches and teacher sponsors making information accessible and communication easy.