Tech for Teaching Blog

  I've got to admit it was hard for me to get an accurate read on the specifics, or the benefits vs. drawbacks of Google Classroom based on the information on their website.  The problem for me was that in these "case studies," particularly in the videos, the products were portrayed as all-purpose solutions to everything that have created a world where everyone is smiling, and the music let you know that you should be smiling too because the answers we've all been waiting for have finally arrived.  Both the videos and the written pieces were long on claims of usefulness, but short on specifics, often conflating the benefits of the overall activities (such as theater) with the apps and devices the students were using while engaging in those activities.  The impact portrait for Brevard Public Schools in Florida claimed that by using G Suite and Chromebooks, the school saw a 3% increase in both ELA and math proficiency from one year to the next, but since I can't hel...

  Wow.  That was great presentation.   Both my kids want iPhones (they're seven and ten years old).  We've told them they can get flip phones when they're twelve, and after that we'll see.  I'd like to show this to them, but they'd be bored by the plagiarism stuff and and are still too young for the scary sexual predator warnings.  Still, before letting them have phones, I'd like to show them this or something like it.  They're already starting to play video games that connect them with people online and make Tik-tok videos and whatnot, so we warn them about people they've never met in person or sharing information, but this guy does a really good job of it.  Plus the action figure scenarios are spectacular. I have to say I wasn't surprised by any of it.  I moved to Seattle in the mid-nineties and had email before almost anyone in the Midwest had even heard of it, so I got a sense of the anonymous scams and chain letters and general dang...