As you can probably tell by now, I love the Google Classroom! Each of my string orchestra ensembles have their own class in Google Classroom and they get weekly practice assignments that they must turn in with a video recording of themselves playing that particular excerpt of their music. I use the Google Classroom to post videos and audio recordings of pieces they are working on, important reminders about concerts and events, and digital copies of sheet music. Over the next couple of blog posts, I will describe my process for grading and optimizing the Google Classroom specifically for the Music Teacher. These ideas can certainly be adapted to fit the needs of any educator. Sometimes I need to send a specific assignment with different instructions to individual students, and not assign it to the entire class. Google Classroom makes it super easy to differentiate your instruction, as you can create assignments at different levels to match the needs of each child in your class. In m...
Teaching is all about collaboration, and Google makes collaboration so easy with it's relatively new feature, Team Drive in Google Drive. This feature is available not only in the GSuite of Apps for Education, but also for their Enterprise accounts. I LOVE Team Drives! I'm a middle school strings teacher in a very large school district that splits itself into "Districts", "Regions", and then "Pyramids". I know, it's a lot of organization, but my district has over 180,000 students enrolled, and is the 10th largest school division in the U.S. So you can see why we are organized in so many different ways. I had the pleasure of hosting Junior and Senior District Orchestra Auditions this year (I know, what a job for someone brand new to the school district!) at my middle school. Because of this, a lot of data needed to be collected in a very official way, and organized so that multiple school directors could access the information. The best...