Making 3 Way or Student Led Conferences a Success With Google Docs

How many of you teachers out there have experienced this? It is mid year and time for your students to participate in a 3 way conference with their teacher and parents. Days before the conference, you help students reflect on their learning successes and areas needing improvement. Together, you come up with action plans for what each of you can do to encourage future growth and development in all subject areas. You help students identify pieces of work that show strengths, and a few weaknesses. Then, on the fateful day of the conferences, a student timidly enters with his parents and completely freezes up at the discussion table, forgetting about all of the ideas he has come up with in class and not using the evidence from binders and notebooks you have painstakingly helped him uncover to support assertions he makes about his own learning. You and parents end up having to lead the conference, subverting your institution's intentions to foster student independence and empowerment. All parties leave the table a bit unsatisfied and frustrated.

One tool that may help you circumvent this sort of scenario is the versatile, easy to use, Google Document. This year, I decided to use Google Docs, in conjunction with my school's subscription to Google Apps for Education, in order to break the 3 way conference deer-in-the-headlights conundrum!

As you most likely already know, the humble Google Document allows for multiple parties to share, view, edit, comment upon, and publish a written piece of work collaboratively. As such, you can use these documents, stored in your school's domain on Google servers, to create templates on which students respond to basic prompts about their learning in each subject. As students write, you as a teacher can make comments about their assertions, or chat with them in real time, urging them to go deeper into their reflection, or reminding them to link a pertinent document to every assertion.

Here's how I used Google Docs this year to help students actively participate in their own conferences.

First of all, months ago, I created folders with each student's name on my Google Drive. I then immediately shared these folders with their related students, using their recently activated Gmail addresses that quickly populate in the search bar of the share setting pane. after typing in a few letters of their name. (To increase transparency, I would also share these student folders with other teachers of these students, teaching assistants, and possibly parents). I trained students immediately after to always create documents for class within these folders, the reason being that anything created in a folder that I have shared with a student is automatically shared with both of us. Thus, if a student creates a slideshow, a document, or sheet in this shared folder, I can see it without having to log into Google as that student. Now, students do not always follow this step however, so I simultaneously trained students to always share documents with me using the share settings pane. One way or the other, I always get access to a student's work wherever I happen to be: at home, a coffee shop, the beach, etc.

Before beginning our reflective preparation for the conferences, I created a document template consisting of a table with rows pertaining to each of a student's subjects such as writing, reading, math, unit of inquiry, and social skills. Columns on this table had basic prompts like: "Things I do well", "Things I need to improve on", and "Action plan to make this improvement". I then made copies of this template which I renamed with each student's name before moving them using the "Move to..." feature to each of the student folders I had created.

I then taught students a short lesson both on how to find, use, and connect relevant documents, images, and movies to the template. After this, students spent about three lessons going through their work, writing reflections, and pasting relevant links into their own copy of the conference reflection template. Meanwhile, at every step, I had all copies of these documents open while students worked on netbooks or computers in the computer lab. During these lessons, I divided my time between working face to face with students to help them focus their reflections and find evidence to support claims, and using the "Comment" feature to add encouraging notes prompting students to dig deeper. Sometimes, I would also use chat to remind students of an important piece of writing or slideshow that they done from a few units before with a link to their own document.

During the conferences, the student and I would load these templates on different computers at the table. Students used their documents as cue cards in their discussions with parents and as bases from which to connect to examples of evidence that supported their own assertions. Parents could see comments I had made to students throughout their reflections. Students updated action plans based on input from parents, myself, and their own conclusions reached during the conference. In the future, ideally some parents could also open these templates on their own machines or pads during conferences (or at home after the conference) and add their own comments. In the end, after conferences, students, parents and I had a living document that can be referred to for the rest of year, or filed to chart a student's ongoing learning journey.

Parents enjoyed this neat, easy to use method of presenting learning. They consistently asked their own children, when reading linked documents and looking at the quality of utterances, "Did you write/do this yourself?" I felt this was an acknowledgement of the professionalism of my students' presentations, a professionalism that parents are more accustomed to seeing in the workplace rather than from their own children. I was proud for my students, as these documents and the displayed links helped them to really show their best learning for those who were most interested in it, their parents.

Check out a link to a sample document from these conferences here:

Sample of Google Doc for 3 Way Conference Reflection

Training to Pass Google Apps for Education

Just passed the second of two Google Apps for Education tests I have devoted a couple hours a week cramming for. Tests are difficult, but make me aware of the structure and capabilities of Googles powerful tools.

Today played with tasks, chat, labels, reference codes...

Check out: http://www.google.com/enterprise/apps/education/

Or

http://edutraining.googleapps.com

Look for more information about tests here in the next few weeks!

New Uses for VoiceThreads in the New Year!

What is VoiceThread you might ask?

Simply put, according to its developers, VoiceThread is an application that allows you to simulate a real conversation online. Basically, you create a slideshow of one or more media artefacts. With these media artefacts, you can do a voice over online using your computer's microphone, a video using your webcam, or you can add text prompting viewers to make certain comments. Your audience then can make comments that surround your artefacts. Similarly to you the author, they can add these comments as recorded, videoed, or typed responses. They also have the potential to use a drawing tool to circle or draw over your media item to make certain points as they are making their comments! When future viewers watch your VoiceThread, what they see is a basic movie of your media items, your comments, and all the comments of people who discussed the item. They in turn can then add their own comments and add to the VoiceThread "discussion".

I must admit, I've used VoiceThread before, but have not been overly dedicated to it. I remember the first time a professor prompted my masters class to use VoiceThread about six or seven years ago. At the time, I recall long wait times for buffering, but remember thinking that it was a pretty cool idea to link images and documents to recordings of your voice. Historically low Internet download speeds in my countries of residence, however,  have always seemed to hinder my enjoyment of what should have been a quite useful application. Kids in my experience have generally found it frustrating when their machines have gotten stuck recording and listening to recordings. Also, I tended to only see this app as another tool with which one or two students could illustrate their understandings with an online, voiced over, slideshow.

It seems now though that my frustrations with VoiceThread were shortsighted. Checking into to its development two years after I last tried it, VoiceThread seems to have come of age. Now I find that Internet speeds are sufficient at my school in Cambodia to make it a powerful and versatile tool to record classroom discussions.

Just this week I used it to record my class' first ideas about immigration and push pull factors associated with it. I posted three pictures on a new VoiceThread of different sorts of human migration: one was of refugees fleeing a conflict zone; another showed airline passengers waiting to go through passport control; another showed economic refugees walking surreptitiously over broken barbed wire.
On each slide I wrote questions using the visual discovery method of introducing a topic. With the first slide, of war refugees, I asked students to respond to the prompt, "What do you see in this picture?" With the second slide, showing people in passport control, I asked, "What are people doing in this picture?" In the third picture, of economic refugees coming across barbed wire, I asked, "What makes this picture different from previous pictures?" When the VoiceThread was set up, and I had registered my students individually on VoiceThread, I sent the link to all my students through Gmail.

After this, I showed students around the data projector in my classroom how to use basic functions of VoiceThread on another example slide that I had created focused around one of my students' posters on a previously studied topic. I showed students how to open VoiceThread from their link, how to view my comments, how to type, record, and video comments and how to use the drawing tool. I then had students use school netbooks to log on to the immigration VoiceThread I had created. I then challenged all students to be the first to add to the comments around my first slide. If students had finished comments on each slide, I instructed them to then comment on other comments that their classmates were making! Students enjoyed the activity and stayed engaged by it. Afterwards, I had students sit on the carpet, and each student read his or her comments and we had further discussions about migration. I hope in the future to actually have microphones and webcams for them to use to add more complex responses or to help certain students contribute who might have difficulty with writing, typing, or English.

There I had it! My students had a great introduction to our central idea, and we have a record to refer to as we proceed through our inquiry. We could even go back and add to this conversation later. VoiceThread helped us to change a conversation we HAD as a class to one we are HAVING and WILL HAVE throughout the unit!

Please post other ideas you have for how to use this great tool on this blog through your comments.