I am entering my second week of “teaching” from home. As I mentioned several times last week...this is uncharted territory but I think I have situated myself...and more importantly...my students...ahead of the curve. I attribute the “bravado” in the previous statement to the fact that my students and I have been using Google Classroom since the very beginning of the school year. We’ve been literally training for this unique moment in time since then.
I’ve learned some very interesting things about my students as well as myself using Google Classroom remotely...
1. With the appropriate level of in-class training and access from home the students have been more than capable of completing a variety of assignments.
2. My students ability to write independently, articulating their thoughts clearly to both me and their fellow classmates (using only the directions I am supplying within GC assignments) is at a very high level for 9 and 10 year olds...see #5 below.
3. The Newsela and PBS sites integrate well with GC which makes content generation very easy for me. The PBS site has amazing links to Khan Academy math videos. Newsela has great content for Science/Health, Social Studies, and a whole host of other content.
4. I should be using GC with my students in the area of Science/Health and Social Studies more if and when we get back to the “physical classroom.”
5. The level of creativity, with regards to completing assignments has been equal to if not greater than the creativity I’ve put into creating the content my students are responding to. For example...I asked students to read an article about how the app TikTok is being used to help educate people about the Coronavirus and what can be done to slow down its spread. After reading I asked students to create a script for their own TikTok video. One of my students actually wrote a script, with himself and his sister marked as actors...using his knowledge of what a script in a play looks like when the actors read it...including stage directions and actor reactions. It was amazing!
I also tried something new with my students earlier this morning. About an hour after announcements and assignments went live we had a video chat using an app called Zoom. The app allows you to invite people to a virtual meeting. The host of the meeting can control things like whether or not to allow text chatting during the meeting, whether or not the meeting will have video or just audio. You can set up a virtual background. I did this for fun and set mine to look like outer space. My wife and I tested the app out yesterday so I could see how things were going to work. My meeting with the students was only 15 minutes long... an experiment. 15 minutes is about the same length as our morning meetings when we are in “physical” school so I thought it would be cool to try the app out in that capacity. The meeting went really well! I had 4 students join...their adult family members were in the background listening in. We talked about how things were going so far working on school work from home. The general consensus was that it was very similar to what they do in “physical” school. That made me feel good in that our “training” for this moment in time (using GC daily in school) made doing work from home seem “normal” to them. I got some really interesting statements and questions like, “I heard we are going to be out until September” and “Are we going to be out for the rest of the year?“ and “Are we going to have to repeat 4th grade if we stay out any longer?” I reassured the students that no decisions have been made yet regarding all of this. I also let them know how impressed I was with how well they’ve been doing on the work I’ve provided. At the end of the meeting I told the group that I’d downloaded a digital copy of a book I’ve been reading in class (The People of Sparks) and asked if they'd be interested in me doing a read aloud later in the week. They all said yes! So...I’m going to send an announcement out in a few days saying when I’ll be doing that. And the beat goes on!!