Thursday, April 05, 2018

Teaching inside Google Classroom

It was time to plan the review class for test 1 of my 3B group. This group of mine has 16 students enrolled and some of them are not as participatory as I'd like them to be. There is the worksheet that we always get in our boxes and which we can use for that particular class. In my head, just as, I believe, in many of my colleagues' heads, this is one of those classes that are usually expected to be exactly the way they have always been: students get the worksheet, they work on it, they compare answers, teacher checks it. It's either this or the other version of assigning it as homework beforehand.

This time, however, I wanted to try something new. Speaking to Ana Netto, I found out that herself, Bárbara Duarte and Talita Lima had been creating these digital tasks on Drive (forms, docs and quizzes) and had been willing to conduct a review class entirely inside Google Classroom. That's right. In class! So I decided to join them. Why not?

Ana shared the stuff they had already put together and I made some other things. In total, they were simple things like editable docs and google forms used as quizzes. I made these challenges in the form of assignments in Google Classroom and, instead of posting them, I scheduled them to be automatically posted at 2:20 p.m. on the day of the class. This way, my students wouldn't see it before the right time. Once they got to the classroom (the physical one), all these assignments previously scheduled had been posted.

Since many of them have the GC app in their mobiles, they arrived in class intrigued and curious, asking about this bunch of activities that had been posted there. The only thing I told them was "get your notebook and a pencil, and follow me". They all queued up behind me and did so. We went to the room next to the Resource Centre at the Lake Branch, the one with special desks that can be rearranged in any way.

There, I had them work in pairs. Each pair shared an ipad. They all accessed our Google Classroom and took up one challenge after the other. Each challenge had been numbered, so they just had to follow the order. As soon as a group had finished a challenge, I would release its answer key for that particular group in the classroom stream tab. The students would go back to the stream tab and check it. Then they would move on to the next challenge.

Would I do this again? Definitely yes. Why?


  • The students were not only engaged but also very excited about doing the tasks. At times, they even celebrated for having chosen the right answers when they cheked the answer key.
  • It was a completely self-paced class. Some students moved faster than others and had the chance to do other things at the end and extra activities in the book.
  • I almost didn't feel my own presence in the room. I think the students felt more independent just by being in a different classroom set and teaching approach. By facing challenges, rather than a worksheet,  they didn't feel they had to report to me all the time. Because of that, the class was naturally student-centred.
  • I believe my students had a greater sense of importance and urgency in this format than in the traditional one of doing a worksheet. As a result, they developed time management and collaboration skills as they pushed each other towards being more focused in order to finish the tasks. That definitely contrasts with previous experiences in which students would notably show reluctance and disinterest.
  • I felt a way more fulfilled as a professional since I was finally able to help my students build their autonomy and potential in class.
In this experience, the students might never notice what we do: the fact that they don't care as much about getting the answer key after they've done the worksheet as they care about taking up challenges and being able to solve problems by themselves.

Lucas Gontijo