I was recently reminded by my mother of all the hours I spent playing "school" as a child. I remember I was OVER THE MOON when I got a real grade book one Christmas with all of the pretty little columns to be filled with check marks and letter grades.
Fast forward to 2017 and the thought of a paper grade book makes me shudder in terror! I cannot imagine life without the basic suite. When I worked in the business world I liked to say that there was not much that couldn't be organized, analyzed, or sorted out in an Excel spreadsheet and Powerpoint was my best friend for those conference call presentations. I now use the Google Basic Suite more than Microsoft and I have to say my love for Google is borderline ridiculous. Not only do I use it in my classroom and teach my students to use it also, I use it for graduate school, and my personal life. The most beautiful thing about it is they all connect to each other!!! In my classroom I cannot count the number of times I have thrown a quick picture onto a Google slide and asked my students to quick write about it, or created a shared presentation with my grade level team to teach the math lesson we happen to be working on. The collaboration capabilities that technologies like the Basic Suite have opened up for teachers is amazing. I can share a Google Doc with a friend who works in Chicago and she can add her reflections on the lesson or idea and collectively come up with something better than we ever could have independently. I can only imagine when thinking about the innovation that has taken place in the last 30 years to replace those old paper grade books, what the future will hold for ourselves and our students. I think it is a testament to the framework that the Basic Suite provides to organizations that the primary functions of word processing, data storage and analysis, and presentation are still strongly entrenched in how we preform our jobs, they have just been updated along the way.
1 Comment
Alaka Pradhan
2/6/2017 09:50:21 pm
Rebecca:
Reply
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorMy name is Rebecca Davis. I love learning and I hope to inspire the next generation to do the same. Archives
April 2017
Categories |