Southwest Iowa Google Summit 2014 Part 1

On Monday and Tuesday of this week I attended the Southwest Iowa Google Summit.  Each day there was a keynote speaker and breakout sessions over different features of Google.

On Monday the keynote speaker was Angela Maiers, author of Classsroom Habitudes. The message I walked away from her speech with was that we have tell and show our students that they matter. We have to depend on them to contribute their genius or talent to our classroom. I ordered her book, Classroom Habitudes, and it arrived today. I can't wait to read it.

The first breakout session I attended was Adds-on to Ease the Google Workflow. The two add-ons featured at this session were Flubaroo and Doctopus.  Flubaroo is an add-on that grades and analyzing the results of multi-choice tests. If your district is 1 to 1 this would be a great way to do a quick 2-3 question exit ticket to assess learning. Doctopus is an add-on that allows you to create class roosters and folders, distribute paperless assignments, and receive paperless homework without over loading your shared folder file. 

The second breakout session I attended was Get Organized with gClass. After attending the session I figured at the gClass does basically the same thing as Doctopus as far as creating roosters and folders.  I have not been able to get the send assignment feature of gClass to work.  If I choose to use one of these add-ons it will be Doctopus.  Both of these may become obsolete with the release of Classroom this September!
The third breakout session I attended was The Benefits of Blogging. The instructor was a sixth grade literacy teacher.  He showed how he uses his class blog to communicate with his students and parents. He showed how his students use their blogs to communicate with each other, their parents, and students from other countries.  His students use their blog to post writing and receive feedback about their writing. They also use them to publish their finished writing pieces.  

A great overall resource that I left the Summit with is the following webpage http://www.googlegooru.com/. This webpage is an easy way to access information on how to do all things Google!