Artifacts of Achievement...Google Style

This year, teachers at our high school have been encouraged to collect student artifacts in order to monitor progress and growth. In addition, it was our job to share student artifacts with parents when they visited for parent/teacher conferences. While good teachers knows their students well enough in order to have conversations with students' parents, the collection and possession of student artifacts makes any teacher more equipped to provide an accurate and honest portrayal of a student's progress.

Preparing for parent/teacher conferences can be stressful for teachers, as they want to make a good impression on the parents and provide meaningful feedback in order to help their students. If a teacher is completely booked with conferences, it is extremely difficult to sift through countless student artifacts in order to find credible work to share with all parents attending.

Luckily, using Google Apps for Education makes my life easier this year when it comes to collecting student artifacts. In fact, I am quite impressed to see how much work I actually collected from my students and stored in my Google Drive in such a short time.

In addition to using gClassFolders again this year, I am using a script called Doctopus in order to share individual assignments directly with students in their Assignment folders. If you are unfamiliar with gClassFolders, it is a free script that teachers can use to create and share class folders and individual assignment folders with students on the Google Drive. It creates a paperless environment for teachers and students, and it also creates a wonderful opportunity to save and archive student work.

gClasshub (the script that connects gClassFolders and Doctopus) makes this process one step easier for my students because it allows me the option to directly share templates and worksheets with students right into their Assignment folders. Last year, my students had to make a copy of templates or worksheets I shared with them and then drag them into their Assignment folders. Doctopus eliminates this extra step for the students and gives the teacher control to place assignments into folders and manage them in a spreadsheet. Due to these wonderful tools, I have over 10 folders (different assignments) of student work from the first two months of the school year. As reflect on the first few months and read through the folders, I am truly amazed at the growth I already see from my students. I am also impressed with the amount of work they have already accomplished and extremely eager to see what they achieve in the future.

In addition to their work on the Drive, other Google tools give me the opportunity to collect even more artifacts of achievement. My students currently use Blogger and Google + in order to share their writing and collaborate with one another. Both Blogger and Google + provide legitimate student artifacts and give the students an opportunity to collaborate and share the work with others. These are two more tools I can use in order to share what my students can produce. In my opinion, Blogger and Google + are special because they provide a different audience for the students; therefore, the work they produce is different than the work we normally see on the Drive.

These wonderful tools, used in Google, provide me with authentic and powerful artifacts for ALL students in my classes. Also, I can access these materials at a moment's notice. The features of Google allow me the wonderful opportunity to sit with parents and/or students and showcase the work they do on a daily basis. Sharing this work is no longer stressful to manage, as I have it all in one place: the wonderful world of Google. Instead, I appreciate the opportunity to monitor my students, through their artifacts, and watch them grow personally and academically.

Student Artifacts = Authentic Evidence of Learning