Aalaa

From etching on stone to writing on leaves and moving on to paper, pen and print, Homo sapiens
have always been disseminating knowledge across distances, at a higher speed for their survival.

High-speed internet, large data sources and faster computing power at cheap rates are used these days less to propagate knowledge and more to send out a large amount of misinformation.

After the arrival of COVID-19, social isolation has become a necessary skill. In these circumstances, how can you as a teacher take advantage of the latest technologies to educate and empower your students?

Well, your Gmail account can help you more than anything.

The cloud is not just a large storage solution, but also a faster and cheaper computing solution.
Free web apps, open-source and community editions have made the technologies available
at an affordable cost to many.

Google Apps is a set of solutions that is available free to all the educators, with a myriad useful tools. There is G Suite for educational institutes available for free, an enterprise edition for larger institutes as a paid version and Chromebook on the hardware side – and I don’t even want to focus on these. Each and every individual teacher with just a laptop, browser, internet connection and a Gmail account can do a lot more than what was not possible a few years ago.

Here’s a brief about what those apps are and how they will be useful to you as teachers. You can embark on this and later explore more with the resources on the web and YouTube videos that are available in plenty. I shall also share a few links at the end of this article. To start with Google Drive is one space where a lot of materials can be easily stored, synced and shared with your students. With Google Docs you can create wonderful assets as teaching aids. Google Slides provide great tools and templates to compose beautiful presentations along with interactive Q & A. Google Drawings can be used to create visual information, which can then be inserted in documents and slides.

The greatest tool of Google for teachers is ‘Google Classroom’, an app in which you can create and make your students join a class with a unique class code, then allow access to resources and make them learn from you. This can be integrated with other apps like Google Calendar to schedule learning activities, share appointments and tasks. Combining with the conferencing facilities of Google Hangout, you can conduct online classes with live video streaming, screencasting and chat facilities.
You can add up to 50 students simultaneously to your sessions just with your normal free account, up to 250 with G Suite for Education and more with the enterprise edition. In the enterprise edition, you can also record the live sessions and make it available for those who could not attend. Even otherwise you can record chunks of video and make them available through YouTube privately to your students.
The Hangout facilities can also be used for video conferencing with the parents. The Calendars can also be shared with the parents.

To asses and evaluate students, Google Forms can be used, to create tests and quizzes. The results can be automatically analysed with a powerful spreadsheet application, which is Google Sheets. You should try conditional formatting in sheets to get exciting results.

With Google Sites, you can create a very effective and lighter website of your own, wherein you can share or publish resources and aids to a much broader audience, maybe alumni and the students who are not in your class per se. Google’s Blogger can be used to express your personal experiences, not just to the people who are in the education field, but also beyond.

You have access to all these when you log in to Chrome with your Gmail account. Click on the ninesquare icon at the top right corner of the screen.

I’m sure I don’t have to talk to you about what Gmail as a mail app can do!

Many of these apps have incorporated or embedded all Google’s mainstream abilities like all types of searches in web, translations, voice typing, OCR (optical character recognition), AI (artificial intelligence) and many more.

Last but not least is Google Earth, a wondrous tool to teach Geography and beyond by creating your own customised projects in it.

Also, these apps facilitate collaborations – they could be between you and the students, or between
you and your colleagues or parents. It could be any activity between the students.

There are many more apps, browser extensions and add-ons, which are exclusively useful for teachers, creating plenty of opportunities to learn as well as to deploy them innovatively.

It is a great beginning to learn, use and empower the future generation.

Reference
https://edu.google.com/products/classroom
https://www.youtube.com/user/eduatgoogle
https://edu.gcfglobal.org/en/googledriveanddocs/

Aalaa is a trainer and blogger.