One Reason I love GoogleApps for Education

On Thursday this week my students have a major science project due. (You can read all about it here on the website I built using Google Sites, with videos in Google's youtube, and docs made and shared using GoogleApps.)

Today I went and checked to see how they were doing.

I opened up my Google Drive and went into the folder to look at their projects. I opened each one and looked at all their work. I left notes inside some of them for the students to read, contacted parents about others (using gmail), and made a list of students that I need to talk to in class. Then based on what I saw in their work I changed the next science lesson to provide more information about how to do the work.

Not once did I have to ask students to hand anything in, or go looking through their desks, backpacks or anywhere else. (Ok, except for one student who hadn't properly shared his doc with me.)

I have complete and total access to all of the student work all the time. Even though it isn't due yet.

On the due date, I don't ask anyone to hand anything in. I already have it all. No chasing students, no hunting for missing work.

GoogleApps give me the ability to give more feedback to students, and reduces my workload.

I teach Sex Ed

When I teach algebra, or how to properly punctuate dialogue in a story I know that at least half my students will only use it to graduate from high school. After that they will never need it again.

But when I teach Sex Ed I know that every student needs it.

God has given us this great gift of sexuality. But then Satan has twisted it. Our world has a terribly unhealthy view of what sex is and how we are to use this gift. Quite frankly, I think that the current generation has a far greater challenge of dealing with this than I did or the generations before me. They don't need less Sex Ed from a Christian perspective, they need more of it.

And yet I have had more parent complaints and problems with my Sex Ed classes than any other. I was even dismayed to hear that some Christian High schools have stopped tackling the topic because of the controversy it generates.

What we believe about sex as Christians runs counter to what the world believes. Which makes it all the more important for us to teach.

No matter how embarrassing it is for me and my students when I have to lead the class.

Disillusionment with BYOD ...... and yet

I have been teaching in a 1-1 classroom for almost 2 years now. Every student has access to a device every day all the time.

We managed to do this by simply asking students to bring whatever they already had. (Bring Your Own Device or BYOD) Some brought old machines and some parents bought new machines. Some families couldn't bring anything, but our school had enough netbooks that we could give every child one who didn't have one.

This has had a huge impact on my teaching. I have the opportunity to try and experiment with many new tools and ways of teaching. Some have been amazingly successful, some not so much. Either way it has now reached the point in my classroom that I could not teach if my students did not each have their own device.

But I am growing increasingly unhappy with BYOD. Here are a few reasons:

1. Not every device works perfectly with the tools I'm using. We are a GoogleApps school which means every student can access all their work no matter what device they are using. But we have run into trouble with iPads. They just don't handle some of the elements of GoogleApps well. (Charts and images inside documents give problems.)
2. I can't help students with their devices when they don't work. For example, I have not had the chance to learn Windows 8 yet and I've got a few Windows 8 devices. When something goes wrong I can't help them. Nor have I ever used a Mac.
3. I get frequent requests to help repair personal devices, which I cannot afford the time to do. 
4. Some students have such bad browsing habits online that their devices have become clogged with malware and have become essentially useless.
5. So far this year we have had 3 personal devices broken at school. Because they are personal devices the question of who's responsible for repairs gets a little murky.
6. Because they are personal devices the students customize them in all kinds of ways. This becomes a distraction in class when they spend more time choosing the desktop background than actually doing work, or playing games or using other apps that they've installed. (Although there is a skill here that they should learn, perhaps a topic for another blog post.)

So, when push comes to shove if I had a choice I would provide a device to every student that was managed by the school. At the moment my device of choice would probably be a Google Chromebook.

And yet.....

This is the only way we can afford to get to 1-1 for every child. We don't have the budget to buy a device for every student. And so  I am willing to suffer through the difficulty and trials because the devices are changing the way I teach.

Which is what it's all about.