Google tools help me deliver better classes

Google tools help me deliver better classes

Google tools are here to enhance our classes by allowing us to come up with creative solutions and alternatives that will make lessons a lot more real and interesting to the students.

For instance, for my Access class last Friday, my students were working on Present Simple questions on food vocabulary, such as “Does Linda like potatoes?” and “What does she have for breakfast?”.

Instead of just doing what the book suggests, that is, having them turn to their peers and ask random questions as they look at the pictures in the book, I decided to use a Google Form that I had created previously, containing only the name of each food in the questions. They accessed the form through the link bit.ly/doyoulikefood. You can also take a look.

My students, then, used the iPads and went on interviewing each other, marking the answers on the form and finally submitting it. They switched roles so that everybody would interview and be interviewed. Important detail: the first question in the form was “What’s your name?”. That would allow me to take my students’ experience to a final follow-up.

As soon as they all finished interviewing each other and submitted their responses, I opened the Google Spreadsheet that had been previously selected by me as the destination to which their answers would be sent. The spreadsheet contained one first column with their names and the next ones with each answer recorded by them about their personal tastes on food. To view it, click here.

Believe me, it was an awesome feeling of fulfilment to see their expressions of surprise when they realised that their personal answers had been saved somewhere and that I was projecting them on the screen. By then, I had already written some prompts on the board that would help students form questions and engage in conversations with their peers.

My next move was to model the next activity by showing them that they could ask questions about somebody in the spreadsheet and find the answers to the questions there. I randomly picked one of my name cards and asked a question about the selected student: “Does Maria like Chinese food?”. Everybody’s eyes turned towards the spreadsheet and they were all able to deliver the answer quickly: “No, she doesn’t”.

After having my students pick a random name card, they worked in pairs asking and answering questions about a third classmate as they used the prompts and analysed the spreadsheet on the screen.

The fact that Google Forms can collect answers and immediately save them in a Google Spreadsheet is only one of the captivating features that Google Tools for Education offer. There is so much more that can be facilitated in class through their use. If you still haven’t found out what you are capable of through them, why don’t you have a try at it?

Lucas Gontijo

The 1st THOMAS Google Certified Educator Level 1 Bootcamp

Teacher Fernanda Oliveira tells us about the Thomas GCE Level 1 Bootcamp.

Taking part in the Google Certified Educator Bootcamp was a very rewarding experience.  There were lots of fascinating insights into the Google tools and the different and innovative ways of using them with our students. We not only had the chance to learn about the GSuite tools, but also to share ideas on our online classroom and during our face-to-face meeting.

We began the Bootcamp by doing 13  online tasks  and  Clarissa also assigned extra tasks so that we could have the chance to practice and learn a bit more. It was gratifying to realize the possibilities of collaborative and creative work students can do by using the GSuite tools.

Our face-to-face meeting  was also full of insights (and fun!). We had planned to work on 18 challenges in the morning and in the afternoon that day, but we were able to do everything within 3 hours. With the support and guidance of Clarissa, Leonardo and Paola, we worked collaboratively and did not leave anyone behind that day. We were exhausted, but very proud of what we had accomplished in the end.

Lots of creative and innovative ideas popped up during the Bootcamp and we are  looking forward to using them to make a positive and meaningful difference in our students’ lives next semester. The sky is the limit, Google Educators!

Fernanda Oliveira

Teens 6 Magazine Project

Making writing exciting

Whenever I get to a writing lesson, I picture my students complaining and moaning about having to write anything. It’s almost as if they had a radar that indicated “boring activity ahead”. These are, thus, the lessons that intrigue me the most just for the challenge of changing that regular pattern.

To do so, I am always reflecting on how relevant and interesting the writing can be for my young teenage students. The formula is not so hard: just take the genre of the piece of writing into account and think about how it could be applied to their realities. That is basically what I did for my Teens 6 group. Writing news reports was the goal, so I decided to take my students from the role of students to the role of reporters.

The students were obviously excited with the idea of becoming reporters and writing a story. The idea was that they would gather in pairs or trios and would each be assigned a certain page of our class magazine. Once I had a Google slide template of the magazine prepared and ready to be accessed through a shortened link (bit.ly/teens6magazine), I instructed my students and took them to the Resource Centre to make it happen.

I had to do it in two classes. The first attempt wasn’t so good because some of my students messed around and interfered in other students’ slides. In the following class, I told them off and told them that they would be given a last chance to finish their reports. I also said that those who didn’t finish would have their pages taken out of the magazine. That gave them some encouragement. On the second day, then, they worked a lot better and behaved as expected.

After joining forces with the Resource Centre at the Main Branch, the magazine was printed out and the students were able to have their own copies. The gleam in my students’ eyes when they saw the magazines I had brought paid off all the effort and struggle I described in the previous paragraph.

Maybe a magazine project cannot be carried out every semester, but something we can definitely do is plan our lessons every day wondering whether they will bore our students or excite them. Bearing that in mind and having some deal of willingness, we will be able to come up with many other ideas that can surprise our students and make a difference in their lives.

Lucas G. Silva

Thomas Innovation Mentors: Aligning views and probing into our teenage students' perceptions

In our second innovation project session today we worked on investigating and aligning our views of our students’ classroom experiences. To that effect, we created our CSD Matrix (Matriz CSD in Portuguese), in which ‘C’ stands for certainties, ‘S’ for suppositions, and ‘D’ for doubts. We probed into our views and beliefs regarding the quality of the experience our students have in our classrooms. Individually, each team member wrote down their perceptions onto post-its (one perception per post-it) within a few minutes for each of the three categories. Once everyone was finished recording their views, it was time for us to process what we came up with. Going over everyone’s contributions generated some interesting conversations on our beliefs, and we concluded that we are pretty much aligned in our views of the kind of experience we think our students have in our classroom.

Team members were now ready to process a set of students’ responses to a brief questionnaire, a google form containing the following questions: 1. Tell us about a memorable English class you had at Thomas. Why was it a memorable experience?; 2. Considering all your trajectory at Thomas, in different levels with different teachers, what is it that you like the most about our classes?; 3. What is it that you like the least about our classes?; and 4. Write a word that represents your experience in your classes at Thomas. We managed to get responses from a mix of teenage students from different levels. We worked in two trios, and each trio looked at the responses to questions 1 and 2. What we did was go over students’ responses, which had been compiled into post-its, and try to identify patterns, tendencies or even categories that would emerge from their responses. The idea was to reach a more synthetic understanding of students’ perceptions and see if any insights would spring up in the process. As we shared our findings, we were able to make connections and identify some ideas which we felt were in the core of students’ responses. We took notes of those core findings so that they can inform actions ahead.

We wrapped up the session with some analysis and discussion around how our findings regarding students’ responses aligned with or somehow validated our own perceptions in our CSD Matrix, and we concluded that perceptions were quite aligned and coherent. As a result of this session, we were able to see a teenage student persona taking shape. A persona who has very specific perceptions of the classroom experience, who has particular needs and desires. The next step is to deepen the insights and prototype solutions to be tested in the classroom. This was quite a productive and inspiring session, and it feels like each one of us is gradually gaining a new sense that we go beyond being teachers, we are learning experience designers.

Would you like to know more about this project? Check out our site: bit.ly/thomasinnovationmentors

Thomas Innovation Mentors: Project Kick-off

Last Friday, March 10th, we launched the Thomas Innovation Mentors Project. We are a team of eight highly motivated and curious teachers eager to reflect on our students’ classroom experience. The idea is to look at everything that takes place within the classroom from the student’s perspective. We want to tap into the perceptions and emotions that our students experience during their time with us in order to gain new insights into possible paths to innovation.

We are adopting a Design Thinking (DT) approach, since its very definition reflects how we want to go about the project: DT is a human-centered design process. Therefore, in our first face-to-face session we facilitated a DT crash course put together by Stanford’s d.school. Throughout the session, team members worked with a partner to redesign a gift-giving experience. In the process, they were able to go through the DT cycle and apply the ‘mindfulnesses’ necessary to successfully engage in the co-creation process.

The 5-stage DT cycle  (Image by the Hasso Plattner Institute of Design at Stanford)

The DT ‘mindfulnesses’  (Image by the Hasso Plattner Institute of Design at Stanford)

Team members worked together to understand their partner’s profile and needs in order to design a new and impactful gift-giving experience for their partners. Massive interaction and dynamic collaboration naturally took place, and the energy level was high up throughout the session. Each team member then prototyped their ideas in order to see how their partners interacted with it. Every stage of the DT cycle was timed, which made the creative process challenging and quite fruitful.

It was a very successful kick-off session! We reached our goal of getting primed for applying the DT process, both in practical terms as well as in mindful terms. We are now engaging in understanding the challenge ahead of us. The next step will be to empathize with our “user” - our students - in order to more clearly define the direction we are headed. We are certain that this is going to be a very rich (and fun!) learning experience for all our project collaborators - teachers and students.

Team members proudly exhibiting their prototypes.