Google Classroom is Google Drive management dressed in beautiful simplicity. Clean and straightforward, it's exceptionally intuitive in its workflow, and is the perfect hub for any digitally oriented classroom.
If you'd like to read more about the new features in Classroom, Alice Keeler has an excellent summary of them, as well as some more detailed opinions on always unchecking a certain box in Classroom (you'll have to read here to find out which one...).
If you want to see the features in action, please enjoy the latest edition of Small Bytes.
All summer long, teachers have gone to edtech trainings, planned new learning experiences, and embraced the potential of technology. In my district, we just finished our 4-day, one-to-one teacher institute (more about that in a later post), and everyone's enthusiasm and willingness to learn showed me what an incredible group of people I get to work with this school year.
But as I asked teachers for their feedback as we wrapped up the institute, one question kept coming up: how were they going to remember everything they had learned?
After all, for nearly a week they had Doc'd, Drove and Formed; EdPuzzled, Nearpodded, Kahooted!, Classroomed and Chromed. Add to an abundance of tools the fact that they're headed back to their classrooms, and the daily pressure of being an educator can quickly erase the finer details of a budding digital fluency.
I know it's not about the tool. But for a teacher, developing a digital toolbox is like a jazz pianist developing automaticity with blues scales and modes: neither can be fully creative in their work without the prerequisite technical mastery.
So to help develop (or refresh) those technical chops, I'm putting together a series of playlists called "Small Bytes." Each one is made up of videos between 30-45 seconds long, stripped down to only focus on the essentials. Teachers don't have enough time in their lives, so the goal is to be practical and to the point. I'll be posting them here over the next couple weeks so folks can brush up on their skills as they're getting back to work.
Today, we'll start with the cloud storage/sharing wunderkind that is Google Drive.
