Google Classroom

The Brief:

You have been asked to provide an exemplar e-learning resource to support a sequence of lessons for a class at a selected Primary School. Your resource should demonstrate a range of the functionality available online and good practice in its use.

Before this task I had never heard of Google Classroom. But when we watched the video during the session about what Google Classroom can do I was excited and began to play around with the different features of it.

At first, I really liked the stream idea which is very similar to layout of a Facebook news feed. I also liked the way you could see which students had completed and submitted work, and those who had not.

We worked in groups to create a test classroom where we could get some ideas for what we might like to do in our Google Classroom for our assignment. I worked in a group with Melissa and Sadia and we began to create the Google Classroom environment for a Year 4 class who were reading the book Into the Forest by Anthony Browne.

To start off the process of working out what each lesson would include, we tried to think of some engaging cross-curricular links. One of the ideas was that this book could be taught alongside a geography topic about Forests, building on the children’s locational knowledge. However, it didn’t take us long to realise that even though the opportunities for a field trip may have been there, Google Classroom wouldn’t have been an appropriate resource without trying to make use of it for the sake of it. After this, we wanted to create activities that we felt would lend themselves well to the functions and capabilities of Google Classroom. This is why we came up with a range of drama activities, descriptive writing but also still some cross-curricular links for example with music.

Through creating the Google Classroom we found that having the Class Google Drive was absolutely essential. Without it, all of our work would have been an unorganised mess. But with the Drive, we could organise the work into specific lessons which could also be accessed by children at home.

After we had an idea of what we would like our sequence of lessons to focus on, we showed it to Helen who gave us some helpful suggestions for improvement. Helen also suggested the idea of having an ‘end product’ for the project. This would be something that the class would build up to every week with the final lesson creating the final thing. As a group, we really liked this idea and decided that our end project would be a Movie Trailer for the book if were going to be turned into a film.  This helped us to work out what each lesson would need to include. We made sure that throughout the sequence of lessons children would be creating content which could be later on used to put into their movie trailer. This includes, sound clips, character profiles and hot seat questions.

The next stage of this assignment was to go to the school and present our e-learning resource to a real year 4 class teacher. We talked through our plans and showed them the resource which we had created it. Again, similarly to the advice we had received from Helen, they gave us some helpful pointers about ideas which would work really well and others which might not run so smoothly. They advised us to swap a couple of activities around so that they were in-class activities rather than for homework. From talking to these teachers and hearing their opinions I feel it has really helped us to develop our e-learning resource.

Since talking to these teachers, we have made changes to our classroom based on the ideas raised and have also added in more ideas of our own like a Padlet wall for after
each lesson. This is a place where children can post what they have learnt from the lesson. They also have the chance to reply to each other’s comments if they would like to.

At the beginning of this blog post I mentioned how I
liked the stream side of Google Classroom. Since working with Google Classroom, I have changed my opinion of this. I don’t like the idea of how once something is posted it cannot be easily moved up/down in the stream it can be moved right to the top but that is it. Also, I don’t feel as though there are many opportunities for Peer Assessment within Google classroom. This was something which our group really struggled with trying to provide as children are unable to see the work that others have submitted. This is good in a sense as it means that children can’t just copy each other’s work. However, when trying to provide opportunities for Peer Assessment it does become a bit difficult. This is why we decided to use the Padlet page instead.