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

Google Apps Contribute to the Audio-Sphere of Phnom Penh

Part of my reasoning for working on this blog is to help me understand and discuss how technology currently enhances life as I or we know it.

As such, I would like to write a series of articles on interesting uses for Google Apps in the realm of live music.

The live music scene has exploded in Phnom Penh in recent years thanks to a perfect cocktail of music loving locals and expats, dedicated bands like the Cambodian Space Project, Krom, Psychotic Reactions, and the sometimes defunct Durian, websites like Leng Pleng, Live Music and DJ Gig Guide of Cambodia, and bars/bar owners/sound engineers who really care not only about getting crowds in and bopping but also about the talented musicians themselves. These would be people like Anthony at Equinox, David at Sharky's, Greg at Slur Bar, and Oscar at Oscar's Bar, all of whom need, share, encourage, and spotlight the local/transient talent.

Fortunately, I have had a chance to join in the sonic maelstrom with two rocking bands: the Fumes and Jaworski 7. There are a few things that unite my fellow players in both of these outfits: they possess a diverse array of mega talents; they create and express themselves in a variety of media; and they are all some of the busiest people, rightly so, that I have ever met.

This last trait creates interesting quandaries when it comes to getting and performing our best at gigs.

Here I'm assuming that most people think the following about how bands reach that sweet spot of standing under lights with amplified sounds and appreciative crowds: band members get together, party together, sometimes argue or fight with each other, occasionally pick up instruments, hang out at bars, and resultantly get asked to play at these wonderful gigs that we all enjoy bouncing around at.

While all these phenomenon, in my experiences, do happen in the course of a band's life, there are about a million other little details that must come together in order to get five grown adults to sit down (or stand up) and play nicely together for two to three hours a couple Fridays or Saturdays a month.

First of all, there are kids and families. Most band members got 'em and devote the majority of their time to 'em. Then of course, especially as expats in foreign lands, there is work. If you don't have it, and don't pay a good chunk of your attention to it, then you don't live here for long enough to play in a band (which anyway you look at it, for most of us is not a real way to support ourselves). Finally, especially being expats, this last minor competitor for time, the job, usually involves a good deal of travelling, sometimes to visit project sites, or to take 45 kids to Thailand on a field trip, or to hit that photo shoot in Bangkok which stretches on for two weeks, etc.

With all these demands for time, in our bands we have found the most practical tool to use to schedule practices, band meetings, and gigs has been Google Calendar.

Two years ago, when I was lucky enough to start playing with the Fumes, Darren, our bassist, came up with the idea of making a band scheduling device out of a Google Calendar. Using my own Google account, I created a new calendar, named it "The Fumes Calendar" and shared it with all bandmates. In order to see how to use this calendar, we all sat around once or twice putting our main events on it, such as days when one or more of us would not be around due to travels or work related issues or gigs which we had already scheduled. For a year, the Fumes Google Calendar proved useful as a point of focus for a group discussion, but agreements about time commitments for practices, gigs, and band planning meetings still tended to involve a complex mixture of emails, SMS, phone calls, and Facebook posts.

However, slowly but surely, each band member started to not only check the calendar, but to add little details related to his or her usually lack of availability on certain days. For instance, it became clear quite quickly, from perusing the calendar, that one band member could never practice on the final Wednesday of a month, due to a competing wine and cheese event at a local hotel. We could also see that sometime our Wednesday practices would not be available as a result of our practice space being needed for non band school related events. Color coding systems began to develop to alert band members to whether gigs were pending band members' agreement or whether they were confirmed events. While trying to plan tours of Sihanoukville, a distant beach town, we could see that teaching commitments of our school would not allow many of our teacher friends to accompany us and therefore we rescheduled to a more opportune time. When scheduling gigs in the din of various bars around time, I would usually pull out my smartphone, open up my calendar program that I had integrated with Google Calendar to check our availability with the needs of venue owners. When overseas friends tried to schedule trips to Phnom Penh around gigs in order to see us play, we would also share the calendar with them, albeit with read only privileges (an easily changeable option). Often during this stage of our calendar use, when someone had a scheduling hiccup, the standard response from the rest of the band was "Check the calendar!"

Eventually, the calendar proved useful in unforeseen ways when our guitarist began playing in a second band, Jaworski 7. He could crosscheck with our calendar before agreeing to gigs and practice times with them, or mark scheduled times he needed to be with the other band to avoid double jeopardy. When eventually, I began playing in this band as well, the calendar became indispensable and I shared it with all of the band members of Jaworski 7. Eventually, we renamed the calendar the Fumes and Jaworski 7 Gig Calendar and it is still our most valuable scheduling tool.

Like all tools, Google Calendar has been used by some of us musos more than others, but it has really made an almost impossible scheduling situation quite professional and easier. If your band or organisation's success depends on keeping track of and working within the confines of the personal schedules of many adults like us, I highly recommend adding it to your repertoire of usable applications.

I'm leaving you with a playlist of Jaworski 7 at various gigs we have been a part of!

Jaworski 7 Play list