Today my mentor teacher (whom is also an avid ICT lover and ambassador) came into film my students for a school wide milestone report on ICT. I love hearing feedback and sharing with others what I am doing in my classroom so I jumped right on this to be able to share. She came in about 2:45pm right before the bell when it was somewhat chaotic and noisy, I was a little paranoid of this and didn't want it to look like my kids were all over the place. I was so pleased to hear her say that it was 'real learning', it was candid, the kids were able to articulate their ideas wll and that she was amazed on how all the kids were on task and engaged. One of the things my students showed her was Google Docs.
I went to the GAFE (Google Apps for Education) New Zealand Summit the day before Ulearn12 (Term 3 holidays). What an amazing experience. I could not even comprehend how much I could take away from just one day of professional development. I went to one session on Google Docs and Google Forms.
One thing I know I wasn't great at was finding time to leave quality feedback or feed forward in my student's workbooks. I give a lot of verbal but was finding when I flicked through their books it looked as though they had received no guidance. I already knew my class loved anything ICT and love to share with me, so I decided that Google Docs was the best way to combine the two.
I showed my student's how they could collaborate on a document by letting them just go for it (a little bit of exploratory play). I created one Doc and shared this with the entire class. I gave them half and hour and said show me your best work. As they were working I was commenting on the side and attempting to engage them in the chat (without telling them anything or showing them anything). I was hearing things like "Oh my god someone just deleted my entire paragraph", "Wow we can chat down the side and it doesn't interfere with the people that are writing" and "Hey Miss can I comment to you on the side and you reply kind of like on Facebook". We then came back together as a whole class and shared the pros and cons of using this as a learning tool. The students were quick to come up with the following:
Pros
We can share work with anyone
We can work together on an assignment on our own computers
We can work from home and school
It is so easy
You can't lose your work because it is saving all the time
Cons
You need to be careful who you share with because your work can be deleted
People might be silly in the chat
From this we brainstormed all the thing we could Google Docs for. We came up with publishing work, sharing homework and sharing other work that was done outside of school that they wanted feedback on. I even had a few students ask if once they are in High School next year if they could still share work with me.
Here are a few example of how we have utilized it thus far:
I have highlighted in green the areas the student's need to work on and then commented down the side to leave feedback and feed forward. In the top picture the student has commented back to clarify something he didn't understand and then it was ticked to show it has been resolved. The work pictured here is journal writing, a poem written in one of my students spare time and some homework.
I am so pleased with the results so far and this has only been in action 4 weeks. I look forward to using this from day one next year!
No comments:
Post a Comment