Going Google happened at first by a chance encounter. Instead of telling you the story myself, I wanted the teachers involved to tell it through their lens. Here is their story:
Growing in age of technological advancements, the half-life of our devices seems to grow shorter with time. All too familiarly, we have experienced having an “outdated” version of a device, such as a cell phone, simply because a manufacturer was able to develop a new product before we necessarily needed one. Making the transition from a flip phone to a Smartphone is an experience where many of our retells include both troubles and triumphs. A similar pattern occurs as we introduce new technology into our 21st century classrooms. As we encounter these periods of transition, we ask ourselves: is the discomfort that comes along with change worth it?
Our experience, as educators:
At Harrison Central School District, we can confidently say that we are proud to be a part of an organization that embraces change and provides it’s teachers with ongoing opportunities to grow as educators. The idea of using Google Classroom with our students originally stemmed from a conversation about how to problem solve scheduling use of our school’s computer labs. Thanks to the support of both Brian Seligman, our Director of Technology, and Jeremy Barker, our school principal, we were able to use laptops to introduce Google Classroom to our fourth grade students as an online platform for revising, editing and publishing their opinion-based essays. Introducing this collaborative tool to students instantly sent waves of excitement, and increased engagement about writing, across three classrooms of fourth graders at Preston Elementary School.
Recently, Brian Seligman blogged about distinguishing the difference between fears and challenges. According to Maslow’s Four Stages of Learning, living in the first stage, unconscious incompetence, includes not having a certain skill and denying the usefulness of the skill (i.e. the adult who refuses to even go near a computer because they just “don’t need it”). Throughout the process of introducing the application to students, we worked to move from Maslow’s second stage of conscious incompetence to the third stage, conscious competence, by recognizing that we didn’t know everything about Google Classroom but understood the value of using this resource with our students. As a result, we collaborated to develop lessons for students and in turn, develop a greater understanding of this tool. Along with introducing this tool to our students came the challenges and discomfort that comes with change. Were there questions or glitches that we didn’t have quick answers to? Yes, many! Was it uncomfortable for us as educators? At times. Did we work to figure out the unknown? Yes. Were we supported while working through the stages of learning? Absolutely. Are we prepared to say we are at Maslow’s fourth and final stage of learning; unconscious competence? Absolutely not. We’re still working on it!
Our experience, with students:
When you have fourth grade students going home and sharing Google Classroom with their parents and a range of learners coming to school excited about Writer’s Workshop, you know that you have opened a new world of opportunities for students to demonstrate their learning. In developing lessons to support this work, we focused on aligning our work with Google with CCSS, other district initiatives around writing and our district’s core values: access, equity, rigor and adaptability.
In our sessions with our consultant, Diane Cunningham, we have been working to: create standards-based rubrics, increase opportunities for descriptive feedback, encourage growth of writing and develop authentic assessments. Throughout our persuasive writing unit, we took advantage of the “comments” feature in Google docs to provide students with rubric-based feedback in the early stages of the drafting process. We then used our feedback to students as a means of assessment FOR learning. Providing students with feedback in the early stages of the writing process allowed teachers to make meaningful use of the data to drive our small group instruction and individual writing conferences. As students worked to strengthen their writing based on teacher feedback, they moved to using rubric-based language to provide one another peer feedback about their work. The increased collaboration among teachers and students provided a more efficient and valuable opportunity for students to strengthen their writing.
Great start: what’s next?
Thinking ahead, we are continuing to explore further opportunities with Google docs and Classroom. We’d like to continue modeling examples of descriptive feedback and allow students to have additional opportunities to practice providing one another with feedback about future writing pieces. Additionally, we are working to integrate Google Classroom in the development of authentic assessments where students have clear purposes and audiences for their work. Throughout this experience as educators we lived through the motto, “if it doesn’t challenge you, it won’t change you.” In other words, we will continue to sacrifice comfort for growth because the cost we pay as educators is well worth the new learning opportunities it provides for our students.
-Veronica D’Andrea
Follow me @brian_seligman
I watched the benefit of this innovation in action as the students wrote and offered ongoing feedback to each other. Let us all be as committed to innovation as these teachers have been in order to find new and better ways to meet our students' needs!
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