Reflection
Assignment 3
ETEC 565A
Mr. Danny Tulk
Why I picked Guitar 10 and Google Classroom:
Not to sound like a broken record, but once again, I must declare my enjoyment to use this assignment in direct application to my practical teaching practice. When I contemplated how I would approach this assignment, I played with a few ideas before I decided to focus on the Alberta curriculum or General Music 10, specifically for the Guitar. This is one of the classes I teach at the High School where I teach. It has proven to be beneficial in my reflection into my own teaching method and has forced me to go through my class material and revamp and re-approach a few lessons.
Also, I was excited to be given the chance to use Google Classroom as my LMS. My school district has is the past two years moved from a Microsoft office suite and Excel platform to a Google Drive, Docs, Classroom, Gmail, etc… focus. With each student given a Google Student account and each teacher having access to a Google Classroom account, it is still relatively new to us and only our early adopters teachers have really embraced the LMS. In the past couple semesters I have often found myself, as the tech liaison, on the receiving end of questions regarding this particular LMS, and more often then not in catch-up mode. This assignment has proven to be very beneficial in forcing me to delve into the LMS and start really playing with it and learning how to navigate it and set it up in a usable manner. I am in no way an expert with Google Classroom at this point, but am leaps and bounds ahead in compared to where I was prior to the start of this assignment.
Where I have found the LMS has excelled and caused some headaches:
Start-up / Set-up:
This has to be the easiest setups I have encountered, once you have access to create a Google Classroom. It is a one to two click endeavor to setup a class and get the access to code to invite students. Once I was given my access email, I was able to create my class and change the background in matter of moments.
However, it was not without issue. The security on who can access the class has caused me some trouble, as I am unable to add people from outside the particular system. I believe this is a setting from the district administrator side, but not sure. Also, as it is a fictional class, I have been unable to see my class from the student perspective.
Customization / Adding pages / Organization:
Adding pages is as simple as a click. However, you are limited in options as to what type of page you will create. Also, few templates exists in the actual LMS and it seems to work better if you bring in other Google Apps (such a forms, sheets, youtube, etc…). Which, I must say is very easy and user friendly. That being said, the LMS should include a formatting palette, I would of liked the use of Bold, Bullet, etc… for headings and general aesthetic appeal.
The LMS does not lend its self to creative customization well. You are very much limited to the headings and page layout that comes standard on the Google Classroom. In an ideal world, I would have liked to been able to change heading names and add headings. Also, as you add posts, announcements, assessments, etc… the home page gets convoluted and disorganized. General posts for the class can easily be lost as the class body is created.
Organization seemed to cause me an issue as the side bar defaults to Alpha Numerical order and as I created class lesson they wouldn’t be in the order I wanted the student to follow. I over came this by numbering the lessons. However, even in the creation of content within the lessons it would order in sequence of creation with new posts appearing over older posts. This caused me confusion in the creation of the content and your only option seems to be to send a particular post to the top, which forces some interesting planning when creating the final order of each lesson. I would like to see the ability to click and drag posts to a particular order on a page.
Assessment:
This was where I was most happily surprised, I spent a few days thinking about how I would develop the assessment I needed in my class. I played with a few outside site such a Survey Monkey and the built in questions to Google Classroom prior to exploring using the assessment option and Google Forms template that us set up. This allows for quick set up and reporting when an assessment is completed. You can set up that the student gets automatic feed back on MC questions and limits who can take the test and how many times. You can also limit the times when a test can be taken.
However, I did find some limitations or, at least, problems that I have not found the answer to yet. I seem to be unable to set a time limit for the test, so that the student only has a certain amount of time once the assessment is started. Also, you are limited in creating feed back for MC questions, which is not really a surprise.
Nevertheless, creating questions and assessments in the Google Classroom LMS proved very easy.
For my assessment, I have developed formative and summative assessments. In each lesson there are small questions that will count towards the students participation mark as well as two formative quizzes (chords and scales) as well a summative assessment. I have also set up a video assessment that will be summatively assessed with a Google handout one on one session and formatively assessed with a uploaded Youtube video by the student.
Finally, there are two additional assignments where students will work in a group to develop a presentation on a assigned Genre and one final performance assignment where students upload a video of themselves playing a song of there choosing with the teachers guidance. These assessment mimic my actual in class assignments.
Conclusions (Thus Far):
Google Classroom is very user friendly and doesn’t require an extensive amount of tech literacy to initially set up for you class. However, it offers limited customization and set-up options that tech savvy individuals my find confining. While it is a great basic system, it requires the other Google Apps and external apps to achieve more functionality.
I am still playing with the LMS and will hopefully find solutions or work arounds to come of these issues as I continue to work on this assignment.