Google Classroom Workflow and Why PDFs?

Over the past few months I have been working closely with teachers in multiple elementary schools and I have found a few things.

1. Working with Google Classroom is great as an organizational tool. Students know where to go for all of their assignments and teachers have a really easy way to house all of the assignments that students are working on. The end game for a lot of our students is to have a digital portfolio and this is a great start into having all of their evidence of learning in one place.

2. Teachers at the lower grade levels are concerned that scanning documents in as a PDF and working with notability is a clunky workflow system for students and organization of different versions of each document is giving them trouble.

In speaking with other teachers I have found that maybe the problem isn't the workflow but the thought process of substituting a PDF for a worksheet.

So I posed the question, "Why are teachers scanning worksheets in as assignments?" which led to the question, "Is differentiation possible using worksheets?"

So I understood, my teachers want an easy way to scan worksheets in and have students work on them. But why are worksheets, simple worksheets still being used. In my schooling I learned that data is a very important for deciding how to instruct our students and where different things need to be put into place. What kind of data is worksheets giving. If we use the binary data, right or wrong, from a worksheet, what does that tell us? Not too much.

My hope, in the coming weeks, is to come up with a way to replace all the different types of worksheets in a transformational way.

Google Forms and Docs can be used to recreate the worksheets AND to differentiate for different learners with a bolder understanding of the concepts on the worksheet.

Explain everything and ShowMe allow for students to transform their math worksheets and EXPLAIN what they are doing in real time.

This is a work in progress and as I head to a professional development day this Thursday I think more ideas will come from the minds of my teachers across the district.