With G Suite for Education, every user in a district has a unique Gmail login and password to enter their own part of the G Suite, granting them access to the following services.
• Google Docs for word processing
• Google Sheets for spreadsheets
• Google Slides for presentations
• Google Forms to create quizzes and surveys
• Google Drawings to create illustrations
• Google Drive to store and share files
Using these online environments, students and teachers can communicate and keep documents online and available on any device that connects to the Internet. They can keep these documents private or share them with others.
To highlight the value of a product suite such as this, note that our writing team used Google Docs to organize and write this book. Twenty-seven coauthors took part in writing the NOW Classrooms series, and none of us can imagine how we could have done this without using a collaborative platform like G Suite. Collaboration, improving work based on formative feedback, and working with digital tools will help even the youngest students prepare for an increasingly technology-driven world so that they can adapt their skill sets to fit newer and better tools as they get older.
Student Privacy and Internet Use
As educators, we make it our goal to prepare even very young students for the world beyond the classroom. For that reason, in many of this book’s lessons, you will see students share their work beyond classroom walls. This connection to the outside world is an important one, but before you start tweeting pictures or sharing student work online, make sure you understand your school’s and district’s policies for sharing information on social media and other public platforms. Talk to your administrator, and ensure that you understand what you can and can’t share online. In addition to staying mindful of school and district policy, you should familiarize yourself with the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act of 1998 before you have students publicly share their work.
With this information firmly in hand, you should also make sure that parents or guardians sign release forms for each student that give you permission to post their work online. Even with a signed release form, never share students’ full names when you post content on their behalf. Posting work as a class or using private blogs that only parents have access to are also safe and fun ways to introduce students to publicly sharing and receiving feedback on their work. Because Twitter and most other social media platforms require users to be age thirteen or older, if you use one of these platforms to share student work, make sure it is an account that you or the school owns.
Assessment
Formative and summative assessment are integral parts of teaching and give invaluable information on how students are progressing. These assessments also help K–2 teachers to streamline their data and adapt instruction accordingly. We recommend that you use your classroom LMS to house your assessment data and ensure that students and parents have access to it. As students share work, give constructive feedback and record your feedback in your own data files. There are many assessment programs out there that may also be helpful, but because this book features creation-based lessons, we focus this text only on formative assessment options in relation to NOW lessons.
CONNECT WITH US ON TWITTER
Meg Ormiston:
@megormi
Beth Hatlen:
@MrsHatlen
Kristy Hopkins:
@HopkinsKinder
Kirstin McGinnis:
@kirstinmcginnis
Lissa Blake:
@D60HolmesTech
Nicole Ring:
@NicoleRing58
Conclusion
Our team comes from three different school districts in the Chicagoland area. Collectively, we have more than one hundred years of experience in teaching and integrating technology. To better tap this experience while collaborating on this book, we created our own personal learning network (PLN). Many different definitions of a PLN exist, but we like this explanation from Karla Gutierrez (2016):
Your PLN is where you gather, collect, communicate, create and also share knowledge and experience with a group of connected people, anywhere at any time. It is developed largely through social media, such as Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, and blogs, helping us form connections, grow our knowledge base and develop ourselves professionally through continual learning.
Our own PLN served as the glue that kept us connected throughout our work together. You can follow it on Twitter @NowClassrooms or using the #NOWClassrooms hashtag. You can also follow us individually on Twitter by following the accounts listed in the margin. Finally, you can keep up with our work on our blog (http://nowclassrooms.com/blog). We know that technology tools will change after this book goes to press, so we want to share and continue to learn with you on our blog and through social media. Think of our team as your personal professional development network.
This journey is just beginning, and we can’t wait to see what your students create, build, and share using digital tools. Communicating beyond the classroom is a theme throughout this series of books, and we will show you why sharing student work creates a broader audience for feedback and how to actually manage this in an elementary classroom. Soon, your students will beg you to tweet a picture of their work and then follow up with you later to find out how many retweets they have. Students will fill their digital portfolio and share their work with parents at home. Collectively, we love the way technology allows families to connect with teaching and learning. We could never go back to teaching in a classroom without digital tools. They help motivate our students to create quality work because more people see their work beyond the classroom.
We look forward to hearing about your students’ success!
CHAPTER
1
Learning Technology Operations and Concepts
Long before any students use classroom technology, you must establish its purpose and function within your curriculum. Students will use these tools to communicate, collaborate, think critically, and create. These skills—the four Cs—will help them form meaningful connections with what they learn.
With such a powerful purpose, integrating technology tools into your classroom requires a little bit of setup. Some technology departments will lay out all the details for you and provide quality professional development in advance, while others will require you to independently implement the technology deposited into your classroom. We have organized practical ideas to help your implementation succeed, regardless of your circumstances. After you establish your initial organization and follow the short lessons in this chapter, your students will take the reins as they use technology to learn and soar.
In this chapter, we first discuss the introduction of digital devices to your classroom. We then offer some lessons