Student: "What are we doing today?"
Me: (choosing to ignore the fact that the student is not paying attention to the agenda in 3 inch letters on the white board) "We're working on _____ (part of speech, vocabulary, etc)."
Student: "I hate _____. Is it on the computer?"
Me: "Yes, there's a link/document/etc in Google Classroom."
Student: "OK, that's cool then."
I KNEW I'd found the right option for us when I had this conversation regarding a grammar test! So when I had the opportunity to attend Google Educator Certification training, I wanted to go---even if it meant giving up two days of my summer break.
The class' purpose was to prepare educators for taking the Google Educator Certification Exam. The certified trainer walked us through the complete set of Google for Education tools and showed us how to use the various features and gave tips and tricks for using them in the classroom. I'm not planning on taking the certification test but I am very glad I took the course. We use the Google suite every day in our class and I've recreated virtually all of our workbook pages, practice activities, tests and projects using the various tools. All of this work has been self-taught and learned via experimentation and Googling for answers. My goal was to learn how to utilize these tools more effectively---to work smarter, not harder.
A lot of the first day was the basics of e-mail and drive, things I already knew, but I did pick up some fun tips and tricks. The second day was much more valuable as we got into the other tools such as forms, keep and (of course) Google Classroom. I learned how to use forms to make a choose-your-own-adventure story and easier ways to set up research and collaborative-style projects. Unfortunately there are some aspects that just weren't much help to me (our district has ALL social media blocked and the students can't access YouTube at all) but it's still good to know if I ever change districts or our policies change. I've also sent feedback to Google asking for some changes (such as being able to add videos to forms that aren't stored on YouTube). Google has a proven track record of listening to educators and responding to our feedback so I'm hopeful that in the future some of these issues will be resolved.
In short, I was pleased with the seminar. I'm still not convinced that I need/want to take the test to become Google Certified, but the information was very valuable and I am already thinking about ways to incorporate it into my lessons for next year. Now if I could just get the district to buy me a set of Chromebooks for my classroom I think we really could be paperless (for student work---we still need our books to read) within a year....