Getting....GOOGLED

My first experience with Google was when I was asked to represent our school at the Midwest Google Apps for Education Summit in the Wisconsin Dells, November 2011.  I was both delighted and a bit nervous because I knew how to use a computer, but I was never "IN" when it came to technology.  I was always behind the times, and still am to this day.  My I-River MP3 player that had two CDs on it was enough for me, until I upgraded to a Sony MP3 player, which STILL only has two CD's on it.  I've never owned an iPod.  My first experience with iPods was during my first teaching assignment when I would ask my students to put their iWhatevers away, because at the time I didn't know the difference between an iPod and a recently released iPhone.

Needless to say, the conference was a real eye opener for me.  Not only was I learning about these technological devices, I was also first introduced to twitter and the power of Google tools.  As a district, we were switching over to Gmail after winter break and I wanted to learn as much as I could.  Leaving the conference, I was overwhelmed and wasn't sure where to start.  I started by creating my own "play" Gmail account.  The most memorable sessions that I attended were "Learn How to Search Like a Spy" and "Leveraging Google Apps to Personalize Instruction."  A comment from the presenter that really hit me was his discussion about do we really know our students and what is going on in their lives?  He talked about checking on students via facebook and watching their posts, but that is very time consuming.  I needed a vehicle to get to know my students better and I had no idea that Google Forms was going to do just that.

I had used Google Forms the past two years as a beginning of the year survey to get to know my students better.  I surveyed them for their perceptions of my course, as well as got to know them as more than a student by questioning what they were involved of outside of school.  I also asked them what they were looking forward to and what they were nervous about in regards to my class.  Leaving the conference, I also saw it as a vehicle to formatively assess my students to see how things were going both in my class and outside of my classroom.  Little did I know, this would be the tool that would open the door to further conversations with my students.  They felt more comfortable coming to talk to me about school issues, and struggles in their everyday lives.  They saw my interest in them from the questions I asked in the Google forms as referred to me "vesting" in them as a person, and not just as a student.  How did I feel about this at first?  I was overwhelmed.  I didn't realize that I could have that big of an impact on my students lives....all during my first year of contracted teaching. 

Google got word of how I used Google forms in this manner, and the Google productions team visited our school to create a video to share our story:

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