This quarter, our Community Engagement Project was to create a professional learning presentation or workshop. For this project, my classmate, Ryan Gritter, and I decided to work together to design a two hour workshop, which we titled Theory and Practice: How Students Use Technology and Using (new) Google Sites to Reach Them.
Workshop description: In this workshop we will use new Google Sites (and other Google products) to discuss how technology impacts student learners and examine how to incorporate digital tools to promote collaboration in and out of the classroom. Specifically, we will consider issues of ethics, privacy, etiquette, and online community, and we will discuss how to improve pedagogy through digital tools like Google Sites. During the workshop participants will create their own Google Site and get a chance to “be the student” by engaging in digital collaboration.
During the workshop, we plan to alternate between discussing how technology impacts student learners and giving participants hands-on time with new Google Sites. Ryan and I have submitted our workshop proposal to NCCE’s 2018 Seattle conference (Feb 14-18) and we are waiting to hear back from them.
Addressing Teachers’ Needs
This workshop addresses teachers’ needs in a few ways. On the content knowledge side, we will discuss some elements of digital citizenship (ethics, privacy, and etiquette). We will also provide them with additional related resources to explore after the workshop is over. Additional resources include information on:
- Selecting tools that are compatible with your school’s technology infrastructure
- Tutorials on using new Google Sites
- Pros and cons of new Google Sites
- Online community and collaboration
- Accessibility and assistive technologies
On the practice side, we will try to give participants an experience in using Google Docs to collaborate and get help from each other during the workshop itself. Google Docs makes it easy to collaborate from a distance or asynchronously, but we want to show how this digital tool can be used to benefit synchronous classroom environments.
Lastly, we want to give them some experience with a new digital tool. In November 2016, Google released new Google Sites. Like other Google products, Sites is free to use and part of G Suite for Education. However, it doesn’t seem as widely utilized as, for example, Google Docs. So to give participants exposure to this digital tool, we will use new Google Sites to host our content and to have participants engage with the content during the workshop. One nice thing about this platform is that it can (and will) remain available to the participants after the workshop ends.
(Note: Classic Sites is currently still available, but Google intends to phase it out. See this post for more information.)
Promoting Active Learning and Collaboration
Everything we do on Google Sites is intended to promote active learning. Based on the prompt, “Knowing is obsolete – Why or why not?,” participants will discuss their own thoughts on the question in small groups and then everyone will “blog” about their own thoughts by creating a new page on the Site. However, in order to do this, we will need to take some time to learn how to navigate the Site as an editor. Once we have done both those things, we will also take time to “comment” on each other’s blog posts.
(I have put “blog” and “comment” in quotes because new Google Sites isn’t specifically a blogging platform, and there is no commenting feature. However, we will work around these characteristics of new Google Sites to do these things anyway.)
Collaboration is promoted primarily through the Back Channel. I knew I wanted a place where participants could chat about the topics or ask questions in real time, but I wasn’t sure what platform I wanted to use to do that. I was inspired by this blog post to use Google Docs for the Back Channel. My hope is that participants will utilize the Back Channel throughout the workshop to expand on ideas and get help from each other. In order to get them started in the Back Channel, we will have them respond to a prompt at the start of the workshop. Here is a picture of the top of the Google Doc.
In line with my first blog post of the quarter on connecting classroom management to collaboration, I chose to include the community guidelines and logistics in order to try and establish initial expectations and practices for the Back Channel.
Publishing the Google Site
Since we are waiting to hear back from NCCE about our workshop proposal, we will not publish the site just yet. If we are accepted to the conference, the website will be publicly available after the workshop. If we are not accepted, I will revamp the site and publish the content. In the meantime, here is a peek at the home page.
