Presentation with Phil Taylor

Jan. 18, 2023

CoryB

Today in our ICT class we had a presentation with Phil Taylor, who was a former educator for many years in his presentation, he came to talk about all the different google tools. After his many years of teaching, he became a google certified trainer and with all his knowledge of google technology, he was going to teach us the benefits of using google classroom for our own teaching benefits. Phil Taylor is also an advocate for wake let, which is another internet tool for teachers to use that can be integrated into the classroom.

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We started with google classroom, he showed us the question mark, which is used to help us if he has any questions or needs to know something. Within google classroom, you can use it for students to put in completed work, see when stuff is due, what is happening in current classes, or for grading their assignments. Also, with google classroom, teachers can use it as a way for parents to follow along with how their child is doing and as a way to communicate with the teacher on a daily basis. As the teacher, you can also make comments on their assignments either public or private, and you can email a single student or everyone with just a click of a button. Phil recommends a few different categories such as today where the students can look to see what is going to be happening throughout the day, resources where the students can see what they need to work on, or if a student loses and forgets where they placed their paper copy if you were to give one out. Lastly, he also recommended having a tab for whatever unit you are currently working on so everything is easily organized and easy to follow along if someone was to miss a day.

For writing works or anything that needs to be written up, Phil recommends using google docs because it saves on its own and if you lose it you can easily retrieve the information that you lost. On google docs, you can also use a dictionary to find a word you don't understand on the site that is retrieved from google, as well as any other information you want to find if you use it to explore you can use it as your google without using another tab to search you want to find. If you need to cite your source it also provides the link where you got it from so that you can go back and cite your findings, which also provides two ways to cite your sources MLA or Chicago style format. Google docs also give students the opportunity to speak to text to have the option to have students to speak out loud what their thinking or what they want to say when doing an assignment instead of typing it out. For math teachers Equatio is a terrific option for creating tests because you don't have to do a bunch of other clicks or tricks to make the test it has the equation perfectly set just the way you want it, saving teachers tons of time when making math tests for their students. However, the only negative is that it potentially will cost you money to get the version that you need. Phil also adds that he thinks it could be beneficial for teachers to get google certified and put it on your resume because it could help you get a job.

Copilot was also introduced to us that is a form of AI that can generate lesson plans and units with just the information that you provide, as well as you are able to auto-generate comments based on the information you give. Copilot has many similarities to ChatGPT, where they can create anything you pretty much ask it to create such as essays, plays, or others things you might try asking it to do, such as some of the things I listed previously.

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The last topic Phil discussed was wake let, which is another source educators can use to share content with their students. However, we didn’t talk about wake let very much it is a free program that is another educator tool that teachers could use in their classroom if they chose to do so.

In conclusion, google classroom is something I find I could see myself using in my classroom to help with my organization issues and is a place where students and parents can easily communicate with me about the everyday learning that is taking place in the class or with any other issues they might have. Thank you, Phil Taylor, for providing more useful information about google classroom and the other educator tools he discussed in his presentation.