Google Classroom – frogphilp.com

Mathemateers and their Chromebooks

Something I’ve not mentioned too often in my posts about my remedial group: the Mathemateers, is that each of them have a Chromebook.

A Chromebook is a complete non-event as a device. All it does is provide seamless access to the online materials you need to use to educate your children.

So I’ve previously written about using Khan Academy and Google Classroom to give my children meaningful homework and challenging practice. Seamless. Khan Academy and Google Classroom just work.

And here’s the thing: my school owns the devices, yet I let the children take them home. How can that be? Where is the safety in that? The management console in Google Apps allows me to enforce safe search in both Google and Youtube. I’m pretty confident that the Chromebooks are the safest device the children have at home.

But it must be an effort managing that sort of thing? No. Not really. It’s less time than marking a set of books and moreover my technician in school spends no time managing Chromebooks. He spends some time distributing apps to iPads and considerable time managing our Windows network, but no time managing Chromebooks.

I’m going to be speaking in more detail about how ace I think Chromebooks are at the Google Education on Air conference at the start of May. Here’s the details of my session. Even better, the Mathemateers will be there in person, through the power of the Google Doc. Might see you then.

If only there was a tool like Khan Academy

So I was speaking to an inspector a few months ago who was trying to look a bit more deeply into my schools maths data. She asked out loud, “couldn’t you make a system that finds out how well children are doing in each individual area of maths, rather than these overall numbers?”

Broadly speaking, that is the problem with data in schools. There’s always the danger of there being so many interpretations and approximations between the numbers that come out of the system and what’s actually in a child’s brain that the data becomes meaningless. Here’s how assessment works:

we decide what children should be able to do by particularly ages or stages and write it down in sentences.
we assess how well children can do the things we wrote down.
we turn those assessments into numbers.

Sometimes those assessments are called tests, at other times they are called observations. Either way it’s more or less the same process. However, quite often as teachers we get distracted and over-focused on the last stage of the process – on the numbers and less on the ‘what the children can actually do’ part of it.

This is where Khan Academy is brilliant. I’ve been using it this term with my Mathemateers group, and even though it doesn’t entirely match with the UK National Curriculum, it does help spot the gaps that children can’t do and provide the children with ways to practice skills that they are still shaky on. I also like the way I can focus the children on a particular skills at a time so that I’m not having to teach each child individually. For example for a few weeks I was focusing on fractions, so I directed children to activities that helped them visualise and practice fractions. I used Google Classroom quite often this – I would post a link in the Google Classroom assignments that would take the children directly to the Khan Academy challenge I wanted them to do.

Why Khan Academy fits in to the inspector’s question is that it gives a brilliant assessment of how children are doing in each area. For example, when setting my fractions challenge I mentioned earlier, I could see that one child had already mastered it, another was struggling at it and the rest had never tried it – it meant I could focus the challenge precisely on what I wanted the children to learn, support the child who was struggling and set a harder challenge for the child who had already mastered it. Ace.

Trialling Google Classroom

Google Classroom: a streamlined easy experience — Google Classroom: a streamlined, easy experience

I mentioned early on in my Mathemateers posts that I would be using Google Classroom to help me ‘deliver content’. So a few words about Google Classroom.

It’s easy. Really easy.

As the teacher, I choose my students from the Google Apps for Education users (we have Years 2-6 set up as individual users). The children receive an email to ‘accept’ the invite, or they can enter a code to join the new class that has set up. From there I can do one of two things:

Make an announcement.
Set an assignment.

The only difference in functionality between the two is that the children don’t have to respond to announcements. With assignments I write a title, write a sentence or two of description, set a due date and then I can attach ‘content’ in various ways:

as an uploaded attachment,
as a Google Drive file (docs, slides, sheets or drawings),
as a Youtube video,
as a URL.

The assignment screen on Google Classroom

It’s over to the students then. Each of my students has a touchscreen Chromebook – this may seem extravagant, but at less than £170 per device I think it is well worth the investment.

I’ve added Google Classroom to the screen of their Chromebooks via the Google Apps admin console, so it’s right there whenever they log on to their device. They can open it and quickly see which assignments they have done, or are yet to do, or (occasionally) are late at handing in.

Like the teacher, they can attach work to their ‘turn in’ comment. So far this has range from Google Drawings to screenshots of other work they have done online. This takes a bit of training, but once they’ve been through the routine a couple of times they soon have the hang of what to do when they have finished their assignment.

So far I’ve mainly used it for homework – it’s so satisfying to know that students are doing meaningful work without sending them home with polypockets full of photocopied worksheets.

It’s early days so far – I’ve only been using it with children for four weeks, but I can’t wait to get it going with the whole school. It may just revolutionise the way we do homework…