The Impact of Technology on Teaching. G Suite for Education and Google Classroom.

Think about the impact of technology on your life. Has technology saved you time and made you more efficient? How it might affect or is actually already affecting your teaching.

The role of rote learning has decreased as students have instant access to the world’s knowledge. Students can take ownership of their learning. Additionally, technology helps cater to individual student needs: resources can be personalized for students and teachers can offer digital feedback. Accordingly, technology is a tool to support teachers in their efforts to increase student learning.

G Suite for Education is a suite of tools that can help you increase opportunities for critical thinking, communication, collaboration, and creativity, all while supporting the learning objectives that you have for your students. These tools are free, ad-free, reliable, and secure. They are already used by millions of students in schools around the world. Of course, free is great, but the best thing is that these tools are relevant to students, easy to use, and open doors to many new ways to learn.

G Suite for Education also includes a number of Google products that promote collaboration among students and with their teachers. Students can work together, in class or at home, to complete assignments and group projects. All of their work is auto-saved, and they can even edit without WiFi.

• Google Docs: documents come to life with smart editing and styling tools to help you easily format text and paragraphs. Choose from thousands of fonts, plus add links, images, drawings, and tables
• Google Sheets: spreadsheets for analyzing, visualizing, and charting data
• Google Forms: quick & easy surveys to gather information
• Google Slides: a presentation tool that makes it easy to tell stories
• Google Drawings: Graphics and flowchart creation with shapes, text, and images

Additionally G Suite for Education includes tools that can be used to save you time and increase student engagement. These include:

• Gmail: Email, contacts, tasks, and communications
• Google Calendar: Scheduling, calendars, and appointments
• Google Hangouts: Live video conferencing and messaging
• Google Sites: Webpage creation and publishing
• Google Groups: Group communication and web forums

Most educators dread using printers and photocopiers, but they’re necessary when you need to make class copies of your documents. All this changes when you use the G Suite for Education. The great advantage is the concept of a live document: there is only one version of it and edits are made in real-time. When you (or someone you are collaborating with) make a change to the document those changes are all saved in the same place for everyone to see.

Communicating information to all members of your classroom community – students, parents and other teachers – is one of the most important yet time-consuming tasks you face as a teacher.

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What Skills Will You Need?

You’re likely already sharing your students’ work with the wider community whether through parent / teacher nights or a display of student artwork on the walls. Communicating to this wider audience is not only important to keep them informed of the success you’re having in your classroom, but it also makes the students’ work more authentic and important:

Create a Google Site

You can create a Google Site by clicking NEW in Google Drive and then selecting More then Google Sites. Give your new file a name and it is automatically saved in your Drive. You can also visit the Sites homepage and click the red + in the bottom right corner.

LEARN HOW

Google Classroom is perfect for copying and sharing docs with your class. You can also use it to distribute and collect assignments effortlessly. Google Classroom saves you time, keeps you organized and helps you communicate with your students. Get started today, with resources, tips and tricks from educators like you.