it doesn’t mean it lacks structure. Imagine a whole new world without a stack of papers to grade in which the assignments students submit are all organized and recorded in digital folders. Access to technology allows teachers to eliminate the stack of papers and create digital learning experiences that are meaningful and even more powerful to both students and teachers than paper. Schools in the 21st century use many different software programs and web-based applications, or learning management systems to stay organized. Most learning management systems have some free features and premium (paid) school or district solutions. In most schools, everyone uses the same system so students and parents don’t need to learn a different LMS for every class. Most learning management systems allow the teacher to message students, assign and collect documents, report student progress, and deliver e-learning content. Throughout the book, you will notice we provide steps for how you can give digital files to students and then how students return the digital files to you through the classroom LMS. Common learning management systems include the following, but you can find hundreds of others on the market.
• Schoology (www.schoology.com)
• Showbie (www.showbie.com)
• Seesaw (https://web.seesaw.me)
• Canvas (www.canvaslms.com/k-12)
• Edmodo (www.edmodo.com)
• Otus (http://otus.com)
• PowerSchool Learning (www.powerschool.com/solutions/lms)
• Blackboard (www.blackboard.com)
• Moodle (https://moodle.org)
• D2L (www.d2l.com)
One option that needs a little more explanation is Google Classroom (https://classroom.google.com). Google Classroom, which is free to use, is a cross between a document management system and a learning management system. It does not contain all the features of an LMS, but it is a great way to get started managing a digital classroom.
In addition to an LMS, many school districts use an education productivity suite like Google’s G Suite for Education (https://edu.google.com/products/productivity-tools) or Microsoft Office 365 for Education (www.microsoft.com/en-us/education/products/office). We focus on Google’s platform because it’s the one we are experienced with, but if your school or district uses a different platform, you will find corollaries with them that allow you to adapt our content to your needs.
With G Suite for Education, every user in a district has a unique Gmail login and password to enter their own part of the G Suite, granting them access to the following services.
• Google Docs to do word processing
• Google Sheets to create spreadsheets
• Google Slides to create presentations
• Google Forms to create quizzes and surveys
• Google Drawings to create illustrations
• Google Drive to store and share files
Using these online environments, students and teachers can communicate and keep documents online and available on any device that connects to the Internet. They can keep these documents private or share them with others.
To highlight the value of a productivity suite such as this, note that our writing team used Google Docs to organize and write this book. Twenty-six coauthors took part in writing the NOW Classrooms series, and none of us can imagine how we could have done this without using a collaborative platform like G Suite. As you will read about in chapter 2, high school students especially need to experience this type of collaborative process to prepare for college and career. Using these online environments, students and teachers can keep documents online and available to them anytime on any Internet-connected device. They can keep these documents private or share them with others.
Student Privacy and Internet Use
In many of the lessons, you will see students share their work beyond classroom walls. This connection to the outside world is an important one. As educators, we make it our goal to prepare students for the world beyond the classroom, and they live in a connected world. We mention publishing student work online throughout the book, but before you start tweeting pictures of or sharing student work online, make sure you understand your school’s and district’s policies for sharing information on social media. Very likely, all your high school students are older than age thirteen, which means they can legally create their own social media accounts on platforms like Twitter (https://twitter.com) and Facebook (www.facebook.com) and register to use a host of online tools and services. However, before you have your students use these services, you should talk to your administrator and ensure that you understand what you and your students can and can’t share online. In addition to staying mindful of school and district policies, you should familiarize yourself with the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act of 1998 before you have students publicly share their work.
Assessment
Formative and summative assessments are integral parts of teaching and give valuable information on how students are progressing. These assessments also help high school teachers to streamline their data and adapt instruction accordingly. We recommend that you use your classroom LMS to house your assessment data and ensure that students and parents have access to it. As students share work, give constructive feedback and record your feedback in your own data files. There are many assessment programs out there that may also be helpful, but because this book features creation-based lessons, we focus this text only on formative assessment options in relation to NOW lessons.
Conclusion
Our author team includes a science teacher who also serves as an instructional coach, one English teacher also serving as instructional coach, two mathematics teachers, a school librarian, and an educational consultant. Collectively, we have seen the good, bad, and ugly that occur during school technology rollouts. To better tap our collective experience while collaborating on this book, we created our own personal learning network (PLN). Many different definitions of a PLN exist, but we like this explanation from Karla Gutierrez (2016):
CONNECT WITH US ON TWITTER
Meg Ormiston:
@megormi
Scott D. Parker:
@scottparker013
