One of the best parts of teaching is the opportunity to remake your classroom each new year.   As you begin this new year - here are 4 reasons to consider utilizing Google Classroom in your learning environment this school year to truly transform your teaching!

Google Classroom creates a single online place for students and teachers to access.  All the organizing of folders and docs happens in the background.  What you see is a stream (see image at right) of assignments, announcements and discussion questions.  Students can click inside the stream to access their assignments.  Teachers grade and return assignments in the very same place!

Instead of standing at the copy machine preparing pages for students - you can create a digital handout in Google Docs and attach that to your assignment with detailed directions. When you attach docs in Google Classroom you have the option to create one for each student - this makes a copy with the students' names attached and sends it to their drive. No more lost, misplaced or eaten assignments!

Teachers have access to their students' work at any time in Google Classroom.  When an assignment is created, Google creates a matching folder where the students' work lives (see image at right).  Each student retains ownership until it is 'turned in' but the teacher can also access the work.  That means teachers can see student progress and add comments or suggestions to assigned work prior to a final product.  

Google Classroom now allows multiple teachers to access the same classroom.  That means you can invite the Resource teacher, consultants or other support staff, or the principal to your online classroom.  All they need is a school gmail address in your domain.  Go to the ABOUT page in your stream and click on Invite Teacher (see image at right). 

Grant Wood AEA’s Digital Learning Team is introducing our makerspace challenge show called Think, Make, Innovate.  The idea behind a makerspace challenge is to spark ideas and innovation, by putting out a simple idea and seeing what can be created.

Get to know our show:

Each month we will test you with a new makerspace challenge on our Think, Make, Innovate Page.  When a challenge is released, it will include a video that can be shared with students to introduce them to the month’s challenge and will be supported with a lesson plan for teachers to assist in implementation.  The challenges are designed to be adaptable to various grade levels and will range from low to high tech.  In each episode, we do a demonstration of the challenge or highlight a school participating in the challenge, to give students some inspiration to get started.  As it often is with making, we show failure and that learning is not always perfect.  We hope that your students will take the episode idea and build off of it to stretch their creativity and try out their making skills to create their own original products.

Our hope is that you will take up the challenge and share your process with us.  Take photos or short videos of your students’ creativity and we will post on them our Community Inspiration Board.  Sharing is easy, just email us at makerspace@gwaea.org or send us the links through this Google Form.

Stay tuned, our first episode, Green Screen Photo Booth, will be released on September 1st.  
Want to know when we release new challenges?  
Or would you like to have your school highlighted in an episode?  
Join our mailing list so we can connect with you.

Remember, Have Fun Making!


~Amber Bridge and Jason Marshall, Think, Make, Innovate Hosts, Technology Consultants

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Recently I came across an interesting browser extension called Wikiwand. It is available for free for Chrome, Firefox or Safari web browsers, and there are companion apps for iPhone and Android. Once installed, Wikiwand automatically transforms any Wikipedia page that you visit into a visual feast for your eyes!

The first thing you will notice are the big, vibrant, cover images that dominate the top of an entry and provide context to the content of the article. There is a convenient table of contents on a sidebar on the left that remains on the screen no matter how far down you scroll. Links in the article have pop-up previews when you hover over them and give you a summary of what is being linked to. There is even  a media slideshow that you activate by clicking on any of the images. The slideshow has all the images from that Wikipedia page.

Not convinced yet? Take a look at the images below for a before and after shot of Wikipedia and the Wikiwand version of the same page. You can also check out a random Wikiwand page by clicking here.

Wikiwand does not provide any additional information to the page you are looking at, but it does make it a lot nicer to look at. It makes Wikipedia pages easier to navigate and easier to read (thanks to the hyperlink pop-ups). There is a text-to-speech feature that you can activate by clicking the speaker in the bottom right-hand corner of the screen, but the voice is not as good as some other options you have in this area, so it may not be as useful as you might hope.

However, in a world of visual learners, where design is becoming increasingly important in our lives, Wikiwand stands out from the crowd as a way to access information in a clean and efficient way. If you haven't tried it yet, it is well worth a look. Check it out at www.wikiwand.com.


Jonathan Wylie, Grant Wood AEA Technology Consultant, @jonathanwylie

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