What is Happening in our Google Classrooms?

Google Classrooms is the online platform that our students in grades 5-8 are using during this period of distance learning. Like SeeSaw, Google Classrooms allow teachers and students to communicate directly online. Our teachers are sharing material like links to videos, reference websites, and online activities as well as documents and PDFs of books and exercises. Teachers are also instructing their students through videos of themselves or of their screens while they narrate along. Students are then returning material back to the teacher. This can be in the form of documents, photographs of handwritten work, or even videos of themselves. The platform is designed so that students are enrolled in multiple classrooms just like in the brick and mortar system. In addition to the subjects taught by their homeroom teacher, students have Google Classrooms for each of the specialist subjects as well: religion, science, art, music, PE, etc. All of our teachers are doing a remarkable job adjusting their curricula to this online format. Creativity and problem solving are being modeled for and required from our students in a whole new way this term, and they are learning a whole new, and unplanned, set of skills.

Greg Henderson