Several years back I happened upon group-based cloud computing rather by accident. I had assigned a project on Early Man to a group of grade seven Socials students. Their task was to log into Wix.com and each create a page or two on a specific aspect of Homo Erectus, or some other stage of human development. In the end, I would have them each pull up their pages and show them separately.
A few days later I noticed that one group in particular each had their websites up and seemed to be exploring each others pages. What they had done was created one account and each signed in under that same account. They realised that they could each work on the same account at the same time. They had not told me because they were afraid I would be upset. I can still remember the shivers that ran down my back and the tear that came to my eye as I exclaimed, “Zach, that is brilliant!” Perhaps somewhat illegal, but brilliant nonetheless. It seems so ‘matter of fact’ now, however, I am pretty sure that that was one of my first experiences in the power of students collaborating in the ‘cloud’.
A few years later, when google docs was introduced in our district, I jumped at the chance to get my feet wet and to offer my students up as guinea pigs. In an initial meeting I can remember a group of teachers dividing up responsibilities, “You take this, and I’ll take this.” It was terribly exciting to be involved with something right from the get-go that we could all tell was going to change the face of how we did business.
It quickly became apparent that each of us would find an area that was more suited to our passions and our skillsets. Brian and Kyle became very efficient at spreadsheets, Avi loved his forms and I simply wanted to use Drive for each and every assignment. It is a concept that I was so impressed by that I would force it on each and every person that I worked with.
What I loved about this process is that you would show a teacher something one week, then they would come back to you the following week with an extension to the original work. It is very thrilling to take what someone has shown you and expand upon it, then share it back. The six-week session in which myself and a group of teachers coached others through this new-fangled program was one of the most rewarding and productive pro-d sessions that I have ever had the privilege to be a part of.
Each new google app that came along was going to be my new best friend. Unfortunately, this was not to be the case. Along with the new apps came a whole new set of ‘technical difficulties’ and student work lost. Sometimes with technologies we let our expectations run ahead of the realities such as bandwidth and quality of computers.
One such app was a recording app (which I cannot find in apps or google to save my life). For years I have had great success with the recording program called Audacity. The main challenge that I have had with Audacity over the years has been the corruption of files as the file has gotten bigger and the loss of files through poor file management.
Therefore, when a voice and song recording app came along I thought that my prayers had been answered. Unfortunately, it took about a week of several classes using the program with limited to no success for me to throw in the towel.
Several months later, I heard about the app SlideRocket. Once again, for whatever reasons, our system was not able to handle this program. Student’s work would not get saved and it would take forever to load anything.
I will not lie to you, The failure of these programs was somewhat crushing to me. This brave new world did have its limitations after all.
These days I continue to use the basic functions of google apps for a multitude of lessons and exercises, but have learned to take any new apps with grain of salt. I certainly will have students go in and try a program for fun first before I design an entire unit around the program.
I consider myself, and my district, very lucky to have this program at our fingertips and look forward to trying other functions that come along. The abilty to have your work available anywhere and everywhere, and the option to have your work saved automatically are definitely worth a few bumps in the road.
Andrew