It was an enlightening experience to go through this exercise with my peers and step into the role of a school board having to choose a digital learning environment. I found it particularly illuminating as we developed our list of criteria for a learning environment and began comparing the various options out there. Many of the choices had strong interactivity/functionality for students/teachers and a lot hinges upon the usability and uptake by the learning community. An interesting point from my research for this assignment was how administrators (aka our hypothetical position for this assignment) believe that technology fails to be successfully integrated into a classroom as “80% of their teachers were not technologically aware to use it effectively”. (Azhar and Iqbal, 2018) Although the district should be providing training in any new LMS, much of the onus seems to be on teachers to become proficient regardless of training opportunities. This was a point in Google Classroom’s favour as the Google suite of productivity tools is so widely-used and provides a lower bar of entry for all.
My group had a wide range of experience with various LMS platforms but no one unifying platform that we all used in our teaching practice. I have personally experienced/worked with Canvas (only through the MET program), Google Classroom (primary LMS for the Abbotsford School District), and Moodle (primary LMS for the Beaufort Delta Education Council in the Northwest Territories). We began by constructing a list of requirements we felt an effective LMS would have. The framework for our requirements came from the SECTIONS model developed by Bates (2014) which allowed us to connect the assignment to our learning in this course. Once we had generated our list, we found that most of the LMS platforms available to us met many of the requirements. A deciding factor for Classroom was, as previously stated, the ease of use and adoption for students and staff alike.
We were able to utilize many of the Google products available through Google Classroom for this assignment: video-chatting over Google Meet (each digital classroom set up in Google Classroom gets its own Google Meet access code), brainstorming on a group-edited Google Doc, and collaborating on separate documents both synchronously and asynchronously to produce our final product. I am partial to Google Classroom as I feel it meets the requirements that have been set out but do recognize that it, just like any other LMS, is not perfect. As I stated in our rationale section “technological tools should be constantly evolving to enhance problem-solving, innovation, decision-making, and teamwork” (Azhar and Iqbal, 2018) and I feel that is exemplified in the constantly-shifting nature of integrating technology into education.
References:
Azhar, K. A., & Iqbal, N. (2018). Effectiveness of Google classroom: Teachers’ perceptions. Prizren Social Science Journal, 2(2), 52-66.
Bates, T. (2014). Choosing and using media in education: The SECTIONS model. In Teaching in
a digital age. Retrieved from https://opentextbc.ca/teachinginadigitalage/part/9-pedagogical-differences-between-media/