Being a teacher today requires great responsibility and passion, for the many challenges that the school has to face and for the amount of commitments, including bureaucratic ones, that must be fulfilled.
Many teachers told me about the difficulties they have to face every day in organizing and managing time and energy between the preparation and correction of tests, the creation of individualized tasks for specific needs, communication with families and other teachers, various meetings and much much more, including the creation of lessons that are interactive and attractive to surprise and motivate students, now increasingly rich in inputs from the world of the web.
What if the answer
to these problems was already in our own hands?
The famous web giant, Google, has in fact created a suite of free, reliable and
safe tools, which allow teachers to enter the digital age, to change and
improve the way of doing school. How? Helping them to increase opportunities
for critical and creative thinking, supporting the didactic objectives set,
promoting collaboration and communication between teachers, but also with
families and pupils and spending less time on paperwork.
G Suite for Education consists of a series of apps for teaching created by Google, which interact with each other and allow, for example, to prepare a verification test and automatically collect corrections without spending hours photocopying exercises and then reviewing dozens of times to report mistakes, but also to have a shared calendar to plan all the meetings, to organize interactive contents in a single virtual place without going crazy looking for them during the lesson, even when there is no connection.
With Google Classroom, in fact, – one of the “top” Google apps for school – you can create a real digital classroom, designed to help teachers create and collect homework without wasting entire reams of paper, creating a copy a document for each student, who can view it, modify it and share it with the teacher, but also with the classmates to receive their feedback and/or for group work.
Within Classroom, therefore, the teacher can create and assign tasks, the students perform them and the teacher corrects and evaluates them, using the web or mobile application; in addition, the teacher knows in real time who has done the homework, who is doing it and who has not yet started to perform it, has the opportunity to view it and provide feedback in real time and the students are aware that the task is always available for their teacher.
On the other hand, students can monitor deadlines from the Homework page and start working with a single click. But not only this, because the possibilities with Google Classroom are numerous: you can ask questions to your class even when you are no longer at school, reuse previously written posts, create a communication to be sent directly to pupils or parents’ emails, make the tasks visible to colleagues or possible alternates, share an article, an interesting video or the slides, notes and researches, making them available also to absent pupils.
A real revolution, therefore, in terms of time optimisation, which is already producing excellent results: according to the research conducted by Evergreen Education Group on behalf of Google, all the schools in the USA that have used the G Suite for Education apps have obtained numerous advantages, including a 72% decrease in homework not done, because it facilitates learning even for pupils with greater difficulties.
What digital tools do you use in the classroom? Leave a comment!