Teaching with Google

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...

It's a Sunday evening and I'm sitting down to grade some assignments in the Google Classroom (more on my music assignments later), and I am thinking about how thankful I am of one of Google's latest features (as of the August 2018 update) in the  Google Classroom , "Topics". I have used Google Classroom for many years now as my primary source for class announcements, supplemental materials and videos, and most importantly, the aggregation in one place of all of the assignments I assign to my students. Google has made the organization of this information so much easier  with the restructuring of the "Stream" and "Classwork" tabs. Within Classwork, you now can organize your assignments and materials by Topics you create. You can even use a topic as a one stop shop for important links to websites used often in your class. I use the topic feature all the time to organize my assignments and materials. I've detailed step by step how to accomp...

Welcome to my new blog, Teaching with Google! I'm Jennifer Horne, a  full-time Middle School Orchestra Director  and tech enthusiast currently at one of the highest ranked Middle Schools in Virginia. I'm an educator with 9 years of experience in a variety of public and private schools in PA, NJ, MD, and VA. I have my B.M. Bachelors in Music Education from  Temple University  and my M.M. Masters in Music Education from  The University of the Arts . I have always had a passion in life for two things, music and technology! Growing up, I could be found either practicing the violin for hours on end or behind a computer keyboard creating websites for my middle school teachers (as a middle school student). In college, I always found a way to satisfy both my cravings for music and technology, and completed years of work studies assisting the Senior System Analyst of the music school at Temple University in offering technical support, computer lab monitoring, and...