My Google Classroom Experience

My Google Classroom Experience

The pandemic taught us a valuable lesson. During the lockdown, virtual e-learning showed how adaptable both staff and students could be. It also demonstrated the importance of online education as a regular component of teaching and learning, instead of only being used during emergencies. Teachers can benefit from the many advantages of online learning and technology as a powerful educational tool by implementing it into the curriculum.

With this being said, as educators we can take advantage of many applications we can use in order to facilitate instruction. Google Classroom is one of the most effective applications to use in the classroom because of all the possibilities you have, we can use this app to use as a part of in-person class or for an online classroom. Technology is a great addition to any classroom! We should find the proper activities and strategies to implement into our lessons that fit our students needs. By creating a lesson plan that incorporated learning management systems I realized that having technology in our classrooms is necessary to have better student achievement and creating more meaningful lessons that would help our students to engage in the class. 

As part of an assignment I had to create my own Virtual Classroom using a LMS, a learning management system is a software program that offers organizations a framework for every aspect of the learning process. I choose to create a Google Classroom since I had never used it before, I wanted to get to know better the application since I had heard that in my district most of the teachers use this platform, at first I was a little confused on how to use it but as I started navigating through it everything got easier! Even though I was new to the application, there exist an infinite amount of videos on the web that help you create and format your own classroom. 

I would like to continue my learning about technology by learning from others and their own experiences, I want to become a master of technology because I know there would always be a a student or a parent who is their first time using technology and as the teachers we should be able to help them. Asking for help is always okay! there is always some challenges when we are trying to learn something new, we should never be ashamed of not knowing how to do something and asking for help.

Here's a video that helped me!: Google Classroom Tutorial

Here are 3 tips I will give to my peers!

1) Focus on your content, not the tools!

We have to ensure that the tools enhances our content not the other way, we should be able to know how implementing technology into our lesson is enhancing the learning experience, otherwise we are just using technology just to have it.

2) Have a backup plan!

As we learned through the pandemic, technology is not perfect. There could be many reasons on why technology could fail, like the internet being down, an application not workin or needing an update, students not having their Chromebook/tablets, etc. We should always ensure that we have extras of laptops or tablets in our classroom in case any student does not have their assigned one, and also have a backup plan for the lesson in order to keep our students engaged despite of the use of technology.

3) Share your knowledge / Learn from your peers!

We are always learning new tips and tricks, we should share our knowledge with other educators to help them enrich their classrooms, as well we should listen to the opinions and the different ways our peers use technology for. Technology will always keep growing and developing, we will never stop learning new technology.