It is the 4th of July here and I spent my evening and morning with two very large dogs cowering from fireworks. This is not the most enjoyable holiday for our house so I plan on spending my day working. I wanted to provide a brief review of the Week 7 & 8 tools but also go a little bit more in-depth about my ideas and concerns implementing these tools in a K-12 classroom environment.
In week 7 we looked at various LMS's including Google Classroom, Edmodo, and Piazza. I was already familiar with Google Classroom and Edmodo so I did not spend much time exploring. We use Google Classroom at our school and each student is provided their own Google account. I love Google Classroom, for the most part, it allows for collaboration, it is fairly easy for the students to use, and it integrates nicely with our online grade book and various other web tools (like Quizzizz). I can also set up assignments in advance and really customize when it will post, due dates and times, and rubrics. My biggest complaint about Google Classroom is the stream. This is like our news feed on Facebook, it is one long stream of the latest updates, posts, and announcements. This is what my students see first when they arrive on our Classroom page and I wish I could disable it. They cannot easily find assignments this way and have no idea how well organized the class actually is because they never click over to see the topics thread. Piazza was new to me and I am quite intrigued by the features. I particularly like the anonymous posting feature because there are some kids who are too embarrassed to speak out and ask questions, however, what would happen if someone posted inappropriate content anonymously? Would I have a way of finding out who it was as the teacher- or is it truly anonymous? I would have to look into this more before integrating it into my classroom next year. I do love that there seems to be ample support for Piazza users to find help and ideas.
We also looked at Edublogs, and I have decided that I am most likely going to use this next year. I mentioned in my previous post this week that I want my sociology students to blog once a week to reflect on current events in society. I think this will be a great way for them to tie our sociology concepts to real-life events and give them an outlet to process everything we are facing as a society right now. Edublogs provides the privacy and security I need, my only concern is whether or not the students can access this on campus through our firewall. Our IT team has all blogs locked- this could be problematic.
The last of the Week 7 tools were padlet and symbaloo. I discussed symbaloo in my previous post this week so I will skip that one. I have used Padlet before in my classes- as a fun bell ringer, where students would post a question or a reflection from previous classes, I have used it as an exit ticket to check in on their progress, and one of my colleagues (an English teacher) has said that she is planning on using this next year for class discussions. Padlet is fun and there are many applications for it, but I do not plan on using this next year because I am going to continue to use Flipgrid to generate class discussions in the distance learning format. I do not want to throw too many tools at my students and overwhelm them.
Week 8 tools are Trello and Slack. We have not spent too much time exploring these yet, the class isn't quite as active with the holiday this week, but they both seem interesting. I joined a few communities on slack and posted some messages, but I am not sure how well I could integrate this in a K-12 classroom. It seems like it would be incredibly difficult for me to monitor all of the possible interactions the students would have and that can cause problems. Trello seems a little bit more feasible for me to use in the K-12 classroom and I could see this being used as a good review tool, where I am asking students to build lists of certain topics to review, or possibly as a discussion tool, or even a tool to help them stay organized and on top of their to-do's (this was the most difficult part of the transition to online learning for a lot of my students so I am always happy to try more tools to teach them organization, self-management, and basic study skills!)
I hope everyone enjoys their holiday weekend. If you have any thoughts on these tools for K-12 use feel free to leave a comment!
Hi - Don't know if this will help, but you can keep your Google Classroom stream page a little cleaner by setting it so that the assignments do not show up on that page. Just go to the settings wheel in the upper right corner. You should be able to see the "Classwork on the stream" section and toggle that switch to "hide notifications." The students will have to go the classwork tab in order to see their assignments.
ReplyDeleteMy school has all blogs blocked also. I'm thinking about trying to make a template with a Google Site and text boxes that collapse. It won't be the same and will likely mean I have to spend more time teaching the students how to manage it. But, if I can't get the blog sites unblocked, that will be my only option,.
Thanks Lori, I will try that! I think that will definitely help the kids and make a difference to "clean up" the stream. It didn't bother me as much until we transitioned to fully online and I realized that was how they were trying to navigate the website.
DeleteGood luck pursuing the blogs or creating a Google Site! I have tried several times to have the blogs unblocked but I have been unsuccessful so far. I may try again equipped some of the knowledge from the course!