Google Innovator is a tool that allows educators all over the globe to collaborate and learn how to use technology in the classroom. The program helps top educators grow professionally and advocates impactful use of technology and Google tools. There are choices to take the online introduction fundamentals teaching which is an extremely helpful foundation for any educator, or you can find an academy in which you collaborate with other educators and complete a required course to gain certification. Both programs are great ways for educators to envision how technology can support student learning and be prepared to actually integrate those tools in the classroom. I took the fundamentals teaching and passed the course!
Fundamentals Training
The fundamentals training teaches educators how to integrate Google in the classroom.
Unit 1: Get Ready to Use Technology in the Classroom - It is extremely important for educators to incorporate the 4 C's into their classroom (Critical thinking, communication, collaboration, and creativity). - Technology can help educators encourage students to develop those four skills and "prepare students to enter an increasingly connected and globally-competitive workforce." - Technology is both a blessing and a curse. We need to teach students how to responsibly use technology. - While textbooks are often necessities in the classroom, it can also be helpful to use online resources for teaching. For example, one teacher used Crash Course YouTube videos to help engage students in the lesson and then would check their understanding through Google Forms. These tools help educators understand what their students really know.
Unit 2: Expand your Access to Help and Learning - If you get stuck or have questions when using Google tools, Google Search, Google Help Center, and Google for Education Help Forums are great resources. - A Personal Learning Network (PLN) is a group of people that you connect with online and learn from. Members of the group can support each other and often become professional friends. One benefit to a PLN is that educators from all over the world can collaborate and share ideas. - Another way to connect with other educators is through the Google for Educators Directory. Resources such as Google for Education Certified Trainers or Transformation Partners provide advice and training from experts. It may be helpful to connect with experts to learn about how to integrate technology in the classroom or the best way to execute remote learning.
Unit 3: Have a Mostly Paperless Classroom - By uploading content to the cloud, you can access documents and information at any place and any time. Even when offline, Google Drive allows you to edit or access information and will automatically save once you reconnect to the internet. Google Drive is a place to store pictures, videos, documents, spreadsheets, and more. - Google Docs, Sheets, Slides, Forms, and Drawings all allow students to access the same document, This can help teachers save paper because students can all access content online instead of printing out worksheets and making copies. Students can either collaborate on an assignment in real time or save the doc as their own and personalize the worksheet. As a students, I have used Google Docs to make collaborative study guides. As a teacher, I am excited to use Google Slides to allow students to make group presentations. - Educators can use Google forms as an assessment builder. For summative assessments, students can take quizzes online, and for formative assessments, educators can use Google Forms as surveys, polls, and exit tickets. Google Sheets is an easy way to collect all of the data from a Google Forms and organize it in a spreadsheet.
Unit 4: Save Time Communicating - Gmail is a great tool to communicate with families, and you can even attach important documents or files to the email. - Google Translate also can help ease communication between students or parents and teachers who do not have the same native language. - It is helpful to use filters such as the priority inbox or stars to mark important messages. There are also options to place emails in a folder (or more than one) to keep messages organized and sorted based on category. Then, to find emails again easily, you can use the search bar within Gmail to search for a sender, a time, or a key phrase. - Communication, one of the 4 C's, can be brought into the classroom through Google Chat and Google Groups. In Chat, students can easily ask the teacher questions about assignments and receive answers without needing to give a phone number. It can help students collaborate with each other or even reach out to friends and other learners on the other side of the world. - Google Groups is slightly more specific in that there is a certain topic discussed within the group. Each group is also given a custom email address which can help you easily send emails to everyone in the group and update emails automatically even if someone leaves or enters the group. - Google Sites allows you to easily create a website for personal, professional, or creative purposes.
Unit 5: Organize Activities for Yourself and Others - Teachers often have a lot on their plate, so it is important to stay organized. One tool that can help is Google Calendar. You can set up reminders and color code different events so that you can easily keep track of events coming up. The tool also makes it easy to share your calendar with others so that you can plan events and see when others are busy. - Gmail can detect when a date is written in an email and offers to automatically add an event to your calendar. This can help you save time! - Google Tasks is useful for specifically making to-do lists and checking off items. It can be reached through Gmail or Google Calendar. Additionally, Google Keep allows you to store images alongside items and color code lists.
Unit 6: Bring Meetings Online - At the end of a meeting, all participants should leave with a clear understanding of what the next-steps are and their responsibilities. - It may be helpful to create a shared Google Doc before a meeting with the agenda to help make the meeting more productive and clearly define the goals of the meeting. If I were to run a meeting, I would create a shared Google Doc that everyone could view the goals of that meeting beforehand. Then, the meeting would be more focused and efficient. - Meetings can also be held online through Google Meet. It is integrated with your Gmail contacts, so it is easy to meet "face-to-face" with people. - As an educator, I can use it to meet with parents whether its for parent-teacher conferences or just to talk about how a student is doing in class. I could also use it to hold "office hours" for students if they need help with homework in the evenings. It is a great way to connect with students and families, especially when doing remote learning!
Unit 7: Bring Student Work Online - Google Classroom has options to reach the entire class or just one student if there is work that an individual needs to complete. One advantage to using Classroom for assignments, however, is that classwork or homework is organized in one place, and you can attach resources for students to use if they need. - Once you assign work and students complete it, they can turn it in online through Classroom. Then, you have all of the answers easily accessible for each student. Teachers can also see how many students have turned in work so that they can remind some people to complete an assignment for credit. - Google Classroom, Docs, and Forms, also provide ways for you to add feedback on assignments. When using traditional paper and pencil, it can take longer for teachers to write out comments and give recommendations to each student. However, if students use Google Docs, the teacher can read student work and give feedback in real time. This can help teachers address misconceptions right away or let students save time by fixing mistakes immediately instead of needing to completely redo a rough draft. - Students can also give peer comments and edits.
Unit 8: Measure, Understand, and Share Student Growth - Teachers can build a gradebook in Google Sheets to keep track of student scores. - Teachers can also use Google forms to give assessments and get feedback on which questions were hardest for students. This allows educators to focus on reviewing specific topics instead of repeating information that students already understand. - Within Sheets, there are many different tasks you can perform to save time. For example, if you need to add up sums, you can enter each number into a cell and then program the tool to calculate the sum of each cell in that row. - You can also add in different graphs such as bar charts or pie charts to which might be used to display student progress. Charts might be helpful to display the results of an assessment taken by the entire class. Then, you can analyze what percentage of students answered a certain question correctly.
Unit 9: Teach Students Online Skills - Since technology is a large part of our world today, part of our responsibility as teachers is to teach our students how to use it responsibly and effectively. When doing a Google Search, students should use key words or filters to help narrow their search. - Not everything on the internet is true. By asking questions such as "Who is the author and what is their goal?", students are challenged to think critically to determine the reliability of a source. If a source is accurate, students must then obey copyright laws and learn to cite sources correctly. - It is important for educators to understand Creative Commons and licensing so that you can teach your students how to be a responsible digital citizen. - There are many features on Chrome such as bookmarks for important pages or chrome extensions to add tools to your browser. Students may want to add a Grammarly Chrome extension to help check their essays. I personally added Grammarly and a Bitmoji extension so that I could add a personal touch to my work and create a Bitmoji classroom!
Unit 10: Build Interactive Lessons - Google Slides allows multiple people to collaborate on a presentation at one time. You can also add in videos, pictures, or infographics to help learners get both a visual and auditory component to the lesson. - Sometimes sources are plentiful but the reliable sources are harder to find/ distinguish. The Chrome Web Store can help students browse apps and extensions to help make learning more interactive. The store also has filters that allows students to search only for apps that run offline in case they do not have WIFI at home. - Google Earth allows students to interact with technology and see the world around them from their own house. I used it for my virtual reality lesson on the Grand Canyon! This can help students take virtual field trips to learn and visualize different locations around the world. - A tool called Your Plan, Your Planet helps students become more aware of their environment and how they can care for the world and minimize their economical footprint.
Unit 11: Captivate your Class with Video - While YouTube can be used as a social media platform or for entertainment purposes, it can also be used for education. For example, you may want to use a video as your anticipatory set to help engage and inspire students. - You can save videos to playlists to stay organized or embed them into Google Slides or Forms to enhance your lesson. - Some helpful YouTube channels include National Geographic, Khan Academy, and Crash Course. - YouTube offers features to help make its videos accessible to everyone. For example, there is a restricted mode to protect young viewers from adult content. There are also subtitles and closed captioning for students who may need that extra reinforcement.
Unit 12: Facilitate Group Work - Technology tools such as Google Docs has opened doors for communication in the classroom. Educators can give their students feedback on assignments in real-time or students can help each other and do peer reviews. - Google Docs has a feature that allows you to see the version history of the document. As educators, we can use this to see who made what contributions to the assignment. This helps us check for understanding from each students and make sure that everyone is participating equally. - Other tools that help facilitate group work includes Google Keep or Google Calendar. These tools can help you stay organized as a teacher or student so that your goals and events are clearly defined and laid out before you. - Technology can help the shy or quiet kids present their ideas and contribute to the group.
Unit 13: Promote Digital Citizenship and Positive Online Behavior - We need to teach students about staying safe online. Part of this means maintaining appropriate levels of personal privacy and having healthy skepticism about things online. - Students and teachers should use strong and memorable passwords for accounts. Students can shar passwords with the teacher and a parent but should not share it with anyone else. - Online conversations should be respectful- as if you are having them face-to-face. - Teach students that if they encounter cyberbullying, they should not respond, block the person, and report it to an adult.