Teaching with Google

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...