Weeks 4 & 5, Google Got Me Doing the Jive

Week 4 lead us to the end of our first unit in order to have enough time for our Fall show preparation. The end of units are always followed by journal checks, combo tests, and written vocabulary and history quizzes.

Loving Google Classroom for journals last year, I remain the biggest fan. My lower level younger classes had such a daunting learning curve the 1st few weeks that I questioned my decision to roll out the iPad journals to all classes at the same time. Flash forward to week 4 and I know I made the right decision. My students have become so comfortable with their devices that class is finally moving at an efficient pace. The icing on the cake is reflected in their journal grades. No matter how many days they were missing, no matter how many teacher reminders a student needs, Google Classroom gives both me and my students real-time reflections into journals at any point therefore giving 100% of my students 100% on their journaling grade. That is such a huge accomplishment in comparison to lugging home or staying late to flip through a million spirals just to find half of them are incomplete and hoping you can chase the students down, convince them to complete it, and get it all completed before grades are entered.

StudyBlue gave me the same instant access to see how many vocab cards each student has with the provided benefits of access for students from anywhere and quiz and practice options. In comparison to using Quizlet last year, StudyBlue has some cool options of adding pictures and recording audio for your cards, however the interface proved to be rather clunky at times as well as log-in issues here and there. So for our new set of vocabulary this unit, I made a template in Google Sheets, linked it as an assignment in Google Classroom (choosing the “make a copy for each student” option) and voila, we are getting out entire written warm up done in half the time since it is all in one app. No fancy bells and whistles, but efficiency can prove to be just as cool!

Students also have to learn a combination and perform it for an evaluation grade. Along with a teacher grade, student complete a self evaluation. Last year I moved it all into an easy-peasy Google Form for all classes. We added the link to the home screen, making an “app” for it. Imagine every student evaluation in one place easily sorted by name or class. It was a must-keep for this year.

Last year for summative assessments, I kept with Edmodo simply because I could not find a reliable testing app that had all of the features AND reliability I wanted. Many apps had no matching options and Classflow.com had quite a few glitches. Since I had used Edmodo for a few years prior to becoming NextGen, it also made it easy for me to reuse tests. Although, Edmodo did require log-ins and passwords to remember, that were often forgotten, I decided to check out the new Google Form quiz features. However, once I started making a quiz and chose created a choice matrix question type, I saw it did not allow me to assign a point value to that type of question. There is the complete possibility that I missed something, however, I decided to keep it as a regular form and grade it using the add-on Flubaroo. I could not have been more pleased with the efficiency, speed, and ease of using it as a tool through Google Classroom. No log-ins to remember, question types/choices I want, and again working all through the Googlesphere.

Now that we are starting learning our dances for Intersection, I have placed all of our show information in Classroom and am posting weekly practice videos as well. It helps keep the videos private for the class as opposed to posting on my website as I previously did. Makes everyone feel more comfortable.

Dance Educators have used Google for two features these last 2 weeks. First, students shared completed posters to our collaborative folder for me to access for printing and laminating. Secondly, we created a lesson plan template for writing their dance lesson plans. I then made a assignment with student copy option, and each group was responsible for turning in lesson plans.

Last week, Dance and Media used our Apple TV and Airplay to share photos from their photography exploration. This week they recorded footage for our fall performance and dumped the footage in our collaborative folder for access to editing.

Jazz 4 participated in a really fun lesson this week, however, I going to keep that as a teaser for next week. Next week will remain mostly journaling and show prep and saving this lesson for next week will give me something fun to write on.

May the Google be forever in your favor!