I believe whole heartedly the culture you create in your classroom has the greatest impact on student learning. It doesn’t matter the textbook or the materials,learning happens when you have a classroom culture where THINKING is VALUED, VISIBLE and ACTIVELY PROMOTED.
Google Classroom takes out the wasted time of logistics, paper, and organizing allowing us to focus on differentiating instruction, providing timely and meaningful feedback, making student thinking visible and providing rich academic opportunities. It is the way in which this tool becomes invisible in the classroom that I LOVE this tool.
Math teacher extraordinaire, Fawn Nguyen, posted about the ways in which she uses Google Classroom. Her examples show how Google Classroom can simplify the work of a teacher and allow teachers to focus on the challenging work of asking rich questions or finding challenging problems. Read her short post on how she uses it in the math classroom.
I write all of this to ask, How has technology streamlined processes in your classroom to allow you to focus your attention on more meaningful work?
New tools, such as Google Classroom, appear to be scary and more work at first. E-mail was once scary. It took time to learn and extra work to check e-mail. It is now a totally easy and efficient tool, not because it has evolved, but because I have embraced it, learned to use it, and made it a tool, not extra work. Google Classroom will be scary until I take the first step. Here I go.