Thing 8: Collaboration

The District I work in uses Google Apps for everything. Not all teachers are on board, but those who use them, love them. I shared a Google form I made as a survey regarding eReaders on the collaborative doc. I am planning a lesson, during which I will be observed by an administrator, where the students will be sharing their Works Cited pages with me from their Google Drive. The great part about it is the program we will be using is EasyBib.com and the students have the option to save their Works Cited pages directly to their Google accounts, and then share them with me and their teacher. What a paper saver! I looked at TitanPad which looks alot like Google Docs. I could see this being used as a note taking program much like our English teachers now have a Google scribe for each class. In another class, I signed up for a Dropbox account and plan on compiling all my library resources in one place. Our district uses Google Calendar for computer lab sign up. We have four computer labs in the high school that teachers are able to sign up for 60 days in advance. An administrator designed the form and shared it with all faculty in the beginning of the school year, and it has been working well. There have been some instances of teachers getting "bumped" by other teachers, but of course the administrator can go to the revision history to see where it took place. The other great thing about this system, is when we have a snow day, the calendar automatically moves forward a day so nobody loses out on computer time! I thought about setting up something like this for the library too, but as it is now, when they come into the library to schedule their classes, I have the opportunity to collaborate with the teachers. I am afraid this would be lost if I switched the library schedule to an online calendar. I was interested in how join.me works. We used to have SmartSync in our computer labs and the library so I could see what each computer was doing, I could push out documents to the students, or I could take over their screens. Last year, our district switched to a virtual desktop computer system, and I have been told there is no way for SmartSync to work with that. I wonder of join.me would work on the virtual network? And finally, I plan on looking deeper into Collaborative Classroom. It looks much like Edmodo in that assignments can be posted and graded within the program, discussions can take place, and programs like this open the opportunity for a flipped classroom. I browsed the topic lists and the grade content areas. I plan to share this with teachers looking for lesson ideas. I enjoyed this module. I am all for collaboration, as I think most media specialists are, and these resources are only the tip of the iceberg!