Philadelphia's Science Leadership Academy Puts Student Voice Front and Center with Teacher Dashboard for Google Apps

Good things are happening at the Science Leadership Academy in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Science Teacher Tim Best and his colleagues are deep users of Google Apps. SLA has cultivated a culture of writing across the curriculum. This is facilitated by cloud-based sharing of documents in Google Apps, and critical friends groups that engage in peer editing.

SLA started using Teacher Dashboard to increase teacher productivity and deepen use of Google Apps amongst the students in the Fall of 2012. Tim tells us, “Teacher Dashboard saves me an hour’s worth of work every time I want to collect student products.”

Marcie Hull, SLA technology integration specialist, notes, “When the teachers need me to help make changes in Google Apps for their students, it is one or two clicks, some typing, and I’m done.”

Take a visit to the SLA website. It is worth the trip to see how they put student voice front and center.

Survey Drawing Winners Speak About Teacher Dashboard

In March, the Hapara team surveyed a small percentage of Teacher Dashboard users from around the world. To encourage participation, we offered to award one Google Nexus 7 tablet each to one technology coordinator and one teacher. Our winners were Rachael Baker, a teacher at the Clevedon School near Auckland, New Zealand, and David Collett, the technology director at International School Manila in the Philippines.

After our winners were informed of their good fortune, we asked them to comment on their experience with Teacher Dashboard. Here is what they had to say...

Rachael, Teacher

"Teacher dashboard has allowed me keep track of how my students are using their email and reset passwords easily when needed!  It has also allowed me to send docs to the whole class via the 'smart copy' feature and to see who has worked on the doc."

David, Technology Director

"As a manager of Teacher Dashboard and the Google Apps for Education Domain at our school, the joy and benefits come from a range of sectors. From an administrative point of view, the application allows for the quick creation and management of student and teacher accounts and helps bring order to the high volume of traffic we experience on a day to day basis. Often schools adopt the GApps suite because of the power it brings to learning, but realize that very quickly it becomes difficult to manage the volume and varying methods of use of teachers and students. 

The extra level of administration and organization really helps streamline the workflow and adds efficiency for us, teachers and students. From a teachers point of view, the added functionality of Teacher Dashboard allows management at a more micro-level and gives some of the power back to teachers. For example the ability to reset passwords, automatically have class and student folders set up and shared, as well as calendars and eportfolios. This standardization of practice helps everyone know how and where things are shared and builds a robust platform for learning, doing away with some of the confusion. 

The ability for a teacher to walk in day 1 with the system up and running lowers barriers to entry and focuses GApps on the goals of the school which are teaching and learning. Finally I would like to say that support from Hapara has been fantastic with great help-ticketing and the ability to speak directly with developers in the company.

At a recent conference in the region, I presented on the benefits of Teacher Dashboard for enhancing formative and summative assessments. Teacher Dashboard helps focus the GApps system on easy dissemination and submission of work, automatically creates calendars and eportfolios and provides other functionality. By creating an easy way of using/accessing GApps, feedback time improves, collaboration increases and the role of assessment is transformed. The use of online eportfolios allows for summative assessments to be preserved, valued and showcased by students and teachers. Teacher Dashboard enables a simple, effective and transformative way to organize GApps and as such allows schools to focus less on the tech and more on the learning which is the overarching goal of all technology in education."

Google Chromebook Pixel in Student Hands

I got my hands on a Chromebook Pixel this week and released it into the wild. For some background on what the Pixel is, check out this review. In sum, killer laptop with incredible resolution and touch screen interface.

Students use Chromebooks in my science class. They check them out at the beginning of each period and return them before the end. On Tuesday, I substituted the slick, aluminum body Pixel for one of the older Samsung Series 5 machines.

Curious about how a student might best use the touchscreen interface, I rigged the test by handing the Pixel to one of the more active and curious students in this particular class. The lucky student (guinea pig?) was Zach.

Our one hundred minute block periods allow for significant independent activity time, and I structure the majority of that time in Montessori-style work stations. This allows me to move around and interact with students individually and in small groups. On Tuesday, this also allowed me to observe Zach throughout the class.

At first, Zach was as impressed as I was with the screen resolution and overall aesthetic. I told Zach that the screen had touch capability when I gave it to him. He immediately began to test that out, and did almost all of his screen navigation with his fingers. This surprised me because I found the touch navigation a bit awkward. It could be that he was just putting it through the paces, but he had a smile on his face as he re-sized windows and opened new tabs and touch-clicked open new links.

In very short order, Zach opened up a Google Drawing, guessing as I had, that this must be an enhanced experience. Just as I was, however, Zach was disappointed. “I can’t do anything with the touch screen in drawings. Really?” I couldn’t have said it better myself.

By the end of the period, many students had gathered around Zach and the classroom was occasioned by the occasional squeal. They had discovered that using Maps with the Pixel touch screen is pretty awesome. Take the best smartphone map experience you can imagine and then port it to a much larger screen with significantly higher resolution.

Because the operating system is Chrome, Pixel users are initially limited to whatever web apps they can use. However, it is reportedly possible to run a second operating system on these new pixels. Yes, linux and maybe even Windows. Putting Google’s competition strategy with Apple aside for the moment, if I could run native applications on that machine, it would most definitely become my primary workhorse. At a $1300 price tag, however, Zach is going to have to wait a few generations before he gets such luxury in class again.

ePortfolios: A Teacher's Perspective

There are many things to consider before introducing ePortfolios 

into your classroom.

  Some points for consideration:

  - What sort of access do my students have to computers and devices?  

  - What ways can I maximise this access? - e.g. afterhours use of school  equipment, byod, etc.

  - How reliable is the internet connection? 

  - How long will the ePortfolio be in use - 1 year, 2 years, etc?

  - What storage requirements are my students going to need?  

  - Will the ePortfolio be protected, or open to others?

  - What are the technicial skills of my students and what do they need to learn?

  - Do I have all the tools required - cameras, scanners, etc?

-       How will the parents/caregivers interact with the ePortfolio?

How to manage ePortfolios in the classroom or school:

1.   Change in teaching practice needed, not just add onto what you are already doing.

2.   Lots of PD for teachers.

3.   Just in time sessions on a regular basis for teachers.

4.   Train a few 'student experts' who then teach others.

5.   Much of the student input can be done at home, if access is available.   Connecting to learning, reflections and metacognitive activities could replace useless homework worksheets.

Blended Learning for High School - Montessori Style

I am obsessed with the work of Maria Montessori. The scientist observer mind that Montessori brought to the education of children, enabled her to construct social learning environments that would be the envy of any major corporate human resources department. Observing the Montessori pre-school my own children attended inspired me to restructure my high school science classroom to reflect some of the Montessori structures that allow for freedom of choice and encourage self-discipline in a supportive and structured fashion.
My partners in this transition have been my two co-planning colleagues, Ben and Allison, but also a class set of Chromebooks running Hapara’s Teacher Dashboard. Ben, Allison, and I have divided up the responsibilities for digitizing our curriculum and screencasting mini lectures as well as laboratory briefs. Constructing version 1.0 of our curriculum in the cloud is a bit like making sausage, but student exam scores (year to year) are remaining flat while student affect is improving markedly. That is encouragement enough to continue with the transition.

The one to one Chromebook deployment means that students have the freedom to move at their own pace when solving problems and watching video lectures, and make choices about experiments they wish to pursue. Like most US public school classrooms ours contain thirty to thirty five students and one teacher. This ratio makes individual contact with every student during every class quite a challenge. The one to one deployment opens the opportunity to make this happen, but only if there is a significant amount of autonomous engagement.

The Chromebooks alone do not make this possible. The combination of a structured playlist with opportunities for topic choice based on student interest, and the insight into student activity offered by Teacher Dashboard make the Montessori-like environment possible. The dashboard views of drive, sites, blogs, etc. allow us to see progress students are making in real time. The Remote Control add-on allows us to view student screens, and monitor student activity as if we taught classes of six students.

On any given block day (100 minutes), I make a point of personally checking in with every student in the class. The Dashboard allows me to approach these encounters with some data. “Javier, I noticed that you took Cornell notes on the Newton’s third law video lecture, but you skipped the formative quiz, and now you are working on the problem set. Can we work together on the first couple questions of the quiz before you do your next problem?” Really.

There are still the two or three students in each class who will not do the work outlined for them without a hand on their shoulder and the occasional furrowed brow pointed in their direction from across the classroom, and at first it seemed as if these students were struggling even more in these classrooms with more choice. Then it occurred to me that I was just more aware of the lack of engagement of these students now that the data was in my face all the time. In my prior, teacher-centered model, I could be guaranteed that they were facing me as I directed activity in the classroom, but there was no guarantee (nor evidence) of their engagement. Now there is.

Montessori’s found that the pre-school mind and body needs some different things than does the adolescent mind and body, but something that is consistent throughout all of Montessori’s work with developing humans of all ages is the need for well-timed challenge and choice. My colleagues and I are on our way to making this a reality in a traditional high school science  classroom with Chromebooks and Teacher Dashboard.

Google Drawings with Chrome Remote Control for a Kickoff Activity

At my high school of 2000 students, we have adopted many common classroom structures so that students moving between classes will not have to do any more code switching than is already required of them by the subjects themselves. One of these structures is a kickoff activity that begins immediately at the start of class before any preamble.

In physics, we frequently ask our students to draw annotated diagrams. 'Draw an annotated diagram,' is one of the common prompts on IB exams, and we use the kickoff as an opportunity to practice doing this. Since we are one to one with Chromebooks enrolled in our GAFE domain with Teacher Dashboard sitting on top, we ask them to use Google drawings to make their annotated diagrams. It is amazing what the students have learned to do by layering simple shapes and extending line segments.

With the Teacher Dashboard Chrome extension that allows for remote control, and snapshot-viewing of student browsers, we can see what the students are drawing as they draw it. Toward the end of the kickoff, I will scan the student drawings (all visible on a single web-page as thumbnails), identify very quickly what misconceptions exist in the class, decide if I must re-teach the concept altogether, or simply pick my focus for a debrief.

For example, today I asked students to draw free body (force) diagrams (example above) of two steel marbles; one dropped from the height of one meter, the second launched horizontally from the same. Since the prompt specified that both objects should be in mid flight, many students (including the one who did the drawing above) aired a common misconception that the horizontal force lingers after launch. I decided to focus my debrief on that exact misconception because I quickly identified that 15 of my 32 students held this belief.

There are still things that are better drawn by hand than with a mouse. For now, to maintain a digital record of all student work, we ask students to use the built-in camera on their Chromebooks to take snapshots of their drawings and insert them into a document, site or blog.

Email me if you would like more information about how to take advantage of Google Drawings and Remote Control of Chromebooks at jack.west@hapara.com

Resources for Schools That Have Gone Google

There are many benefits for educational institutions that adopt Google Apps for Education. Many of the benefits are not visible right away, however. There are online resources and communities to help us find the hidden gems and guide us in best practices. In this post I will list all of the support structures that I am aware of, and that the few folks I consulted on this shared with me. Undoubtedly there will be many that we missed. Please tell us of other resources in the comments and I will add them to the original post as they come in.

From the Mothership
GAFE FAQs
Google’s Guide to Going Google
Technical Support for GAFE Admins (the technical heroes that make it happen in the background)
Google Chromebook Schools Google Group (Mostly technical discussions and requires membership)
Google in Education Google Plus Page
Google in Education Website
Eduonair Online Hangout Series
Google Apps Regional Google Groups

Conferences
GAFE Summit Series (Hosted by Edtech Team)
GAFE Summits (Hosted by others)

Trainers and Training
Become a Google Apps Certified Trainer
Directory of Google Apps Certified Trainers
Google Teacher Academy
Eduonair Online Hangout Series (double listed here again because this is a great resource)

Tips and Tricks Websites focussed on GAFE and Chromebooks
Google Gooru
Jennie Magiera's Chromebook PLC

Addendum..
Google+ Communities
Google Apps for Education community - Everything GAFE
Google Chromebook community - discussion about Chromebooks for Edu