It feels like a very long time since I last posted, but I see now that it has only been a month. After my brief push to apply to become a Google Innovator I’ve been focused on trying to get caught up with my other work. Some of that work has been trying to encourage others to move over to G Suite for Education (shortened to G Suite for the rest of this blog). To that end I have been trying to get a Faculty Development presentation going at my university, but I have also been working on getting two part-time English teachers interested. I had a two-hour session with one of them and showed him how Google could help him more easily do what he is doing now. The next step is to get him to try new things.
What prompted me to think about this topic is a good friend from my ESL MA program in the U.S. (from 30 years ago) and her husband came to visit us. I had mentioned that I was using Google more and she asked a question that threw me. “What is Google good for?” She didn’t mean it as a “gotcha”—she was asking out of genuine curiosity, but it threw me.
Often my first thought about LMSs like Google Classroom and Moodle is unfortunately that it helps me manage my classes that consist mostly of more than 30 students and up to 50 students. Along with cooperative learning structures I can easily get students into groups and can easily get their tasks to them. It frees me from paper, since everything I do is online. Even if students miss a class (and there are many legitimate reasons for missing) they can check what they missed using Classroom and Google Sites, on which I post weekly summary of what we do in class each week (we only meet once a week).
However, what I think G Suite does let me do is to help them share their ideas as they work through the worksheet I created for my language teaching approach. In the past they did it on paper, but in the past couple weeks I’ve finally come to realize that I can do it all on Google Forms. By doing everything on Google I can observe their interactions at each step as they move from pair work, work in groups of fours, and then go out to interact with other groups. I can also easily collect their ideas since it’s in digital form and can rearrange it in lists, word clouds, and even Quizlet.
I think the focus of my “communication English” course is to help them communicate. They don’t need any more grammar since they have had so much up to college and they also get it in another class anyway. They need chances to interact with each other and with each other’s ideas. G Suite helps me help them do that.
My goal in the future is to find ways to do that better. My students have access only to their smart phones so I need to figure out ways to get beyond the limitations of technological savvy (usually mine about what their various phones can do) and such problems as old versions of software, outdated phones, and dead batteries.
Most importantly, I want to learn how to put G Suite through its paces to help students learn. I will be spending three days in August at the Google Headquarters in Japan with 35 very talented Innovators in training coached by people who really know their stuff and supported by Google staff. Who knows how far I will be able to go?
I didn’t have a very good answer ready for my ESL friend. I’m still working on a good one, but I’m getting there.
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