Hosting My PD Session Blog Post 4

On Tuesday, April 3, I held my Google Classroom session with three participants.  One was a math teacher, one was an English teacher and the other our Business Technologies teacher.  It was a well rounded group to showcase how GC could be used in multiple disciplines.

My session started with getting the participants to join the class.  They had previously been emailed with the code as well as invited through GC.  We found that some of them had not received the invite from GC or could not join with our school email address.  I had set up the PD session under regular Google Classroom.  Our district has signed us up for G Suite for Education using our school email accounts.  We concluded that may have been the issue because when we used a different email account we no longer encountered that problem.

The first objective of the session was to  educate my participants on what GC could do. I had a welcome announcement for them to start.  Then we looked at the discussion question.  I pointed out that they could not see any other responses until they had made their own.  We discussed this was a good feature because the students had to commit to answering the question and not rely on what someone else may have posted.  As they worked on that I switched my screen on the monitor so they could see it from the teachers point of view.  The next thing I had them do was an assignment to list 5 ways they use technology in their classroom now.  I showed them again how it looks on the teachers screen.  They could see assignments not completed and then code to completed after they submitted their assignment.

The second objective was to have them create a GC page themselves.  At this point we turned our attention to the PPT.  We watched videos on how to do the different steps.  After the video was done playing I would walk them through the steps as they created their page. After creating their page they invited each other as participants.  They also added an opening announcement, a discussion question and an assignment.

As we closed I shared with them that I use CANVAS which is provided by our district.  I compared aspects of GC with CANVAS.