Using Rubrics with Google Classroom

I've used the new rubric feature in Google Classroom for the first time. I like it. It is easier to use than the old Goobric/ Doctopus hack that one use to have to do. But I do miss the library of premade Goobrics. Google Classroom should add some basic rubric templates. In time, I will be able to reuse assignments containing rubrics, and thus reuse already made rubrics. But in the meantime, I'll be making at least several more from scratch.

To learn more about rubrics in Google Classroom, click here to learn more from Google.
Here's a video of me using the new feature.

Finding Space

I am teaching a well-regarded and well- designed course with a long-standing legacy and am one of a cohort of six teachers who teach this course to the entire 11th grade.

It is good.

Yet as an ed-tech specialist, I am finding it very difficult to meaningfully integrate technology. There are several reasons for this.... at least I think so.

1) The relentless pace.
2) Coverage of content.
3) The type of content.
4) I've never taught the class before.

We are proud that we teach kids to actively make meaning. As a history teacher, I sometimes wish we gave more context so that the kids could more easily make meaning out of these remote texts. But I read Bruce Lesh and other thought leaders in the teaching of history, and clearly this course does a lot of what they suggest.

Perhaps I should leave good enough alone. After all, I do have my students blog. That's tech, right? But I've made a big push for multimodal publishing in the classroom and a month in, my students have done very little. We haven't made videos or sparkpages or infographics or anything like that.

I'll need to be more intentional about incorporating tech to enhance learning. After all, if the technology integration specialist isn't doing it, who will?

I'm reminded that teaching is hard, that incorporating new things is hard. I'm also increasingly aware that it is easier to add technology to a new course than retrofit tech to an old one.

Readers, I'm glad for any advice.

Ever Doubt Yourself?

Critical self reflection ain't fun. No one really enjoys it. Teachers are in a unique position relative to many other professions because our feedback is always immediate. Only the most obtuse of us don't care or don't self-reflect. Quite often my inner narrative goes something like this... , " That lesson didn't go well" or "I could have handled that better".

I take a certain comfort in this article, which suggests that students actually aren't the best judges of their own learning. Maybe I'm doing better than I thought! This peer-reviewed study finds that students’ perception of their own learning can be anticorrelated with their actual learning under well-controlled implementations of active learning versus passive lectures.

Harvard prof Eric Mazur, featured here, realized that though his students could answer sophisticated questions by memorizing formulae, they actually knew very little even though he was seen by his students as a gifted and engaging teacher. Yet, 

[his] students had improved at handling equations and formulas, he explains, but when it came to understanding “what the real meanings of these things are, they basically reverted to Aristotelian logic—thousands of years back.” For example, they could recite Newton’s Third Law and apply it to numerical problems, but when asked about a real-world event like a collision between a heavy truck and a light car, many firmly declared that the heavy truck exerts a larger force. (Actually, an object’s weight is irrelevant to the force exerted.)

Mazur re-examined his practices and essentially flipped his classroom. Go back and check out the article and some of the videos accompanying the article. It's given me good food for thought. How can I do this more in my teaching.