Get Connected - April 2008 - (Page 9)

Much More Than E-mail Gaggle Helps Greeneville High School, TN, Students “Take Ownership” of Learning Sixteen- and 17-year-olds blogging heatedly about presidential candidates. Debating the issues. Weighing the credibility and merits of the individual candidates’ platforms. Rigorously analyzing—bandying about terms like “aphorism,” “metaphor” and “propaganda”—the rhetorical powers of each candidate. Who says America’s youth are politically disengaged and unconcerned about America’s future? And who says their time on the Internet is given entirely to mindless, narcissistic pursuits of coolness, brand-name merchandise, video gaming and celebrity gossip? Teacher Jamie House’s students are extremely engaged—at least for the span of their recent “Rhetoric, Propaganda, and Politics” lesson in her junior English class at Greeneville High School in Greene County, TN—and their commendable efforts have been empowered by Gaggle functionalities you may not have considered. That’s right: Gaggle is much more than just an e-mail program. Any chance to use technology-enabled learning, she’ll take it Although a 23-year veteran teaching high school and middle school English and literature, House approaches her work with as much eagerness and adaptability as she ever has. If she suspects something might somehow enhance the teaching or learning experience, she is quick to give it a try. In January, she and other Greeneville High teachers attended a Gaggle training workshop lead by ENA’s Professional Development Instructor Barbara Neligan. During that training, House and her colleagues discovered that Gaggle—wellknown as an extremely useful e-mail program for schools—is also rich in other features such as digital lockers, blogs, discussion boards, user-profile pages and more. The workshop provided the attendees with ideas on how to administer Gaggle in their district as well as ways to integrate the collaboration tools into their classroom teaching. In a matter of days, House had begun assimilating these collaboration tools into her classroom. In one of the first exercises, she asked her students to blog about political commercials they had watched on streaming video in class. A week later, House started her cross-disciplinary study of Puritanism, the Red Scare, McCarthyism, Arthur Miller and drama in the same junior English class. As her students read Miller’s play The Crucible, House posted questions on the Gaggle message board for them to respond to in short essay form as homework. Meanwhile, she had also begun sending all of her juniors and sophomores their first weekly progress reports via e-mail. Gaggle’s tools “are just too easy not to use” “Although I do consider myself a techsavvy person,” explained House, “these tools are just too easy not to use, no matter who you are.” For instance, she says, once she had all her students’ Gaggle e-mail account addresses and had entered a grade for each student in the grading system, sending the progress report over e-mail was a matter of hitting the send button. “That’s so incredibly easy, yet such a fabulous tool. My students always know where they stand academically, and even if I can’t connect with their parents, there’s a record that I’ve contacted the student about his or her progress. It can be a motivator for both the student and the parent.” Students value them for the ownership and control As for the students, they are responding well to House’s integration of Gaggle’s other functionalities into their learning. “I think they really like using Gaggle in all these capabilities because it’s theirs, you know what I mean?” explains House. “It’s not a lecture I’m giving or PowerPoint slides that we’re flipping through, but something that belongs to them. They have control over these exercises, and that makes it special to them. It’s not purely me giving and them receiving.” She had already seen some evidence of that high value to students with their personal Gaggle “lockers” even before her experimentation with Gaggle’s blogs and message boards. Her students tend to save all of their papers to their lockers rather than to classroom computer hard drives or to disks at home because their lockers are private and password-protected. Once she jokingly threatened to change the Gaggle password of a student “prone to being off-task” and was astonished at how instantly her idle threat seized the student’s attention. “He said, ‘No, no, no, you can’t do that! I have to get in there and do my homework tonight!’” House recalls. “Of course, I didn’t change his password, but I thought what a great little caveat to hang out there for getting certain results.” In fact, less than one percent of schools using Gaggle’s student e-mail report abuse of the system. The threat of losing the account, combined with the customizable reporting and blocking capabilities, makes students highly accountable. A taste of college “On top of everything else,” adds House, “they’re already seeing some of the things they’re going to see in college, like Blackboard,” referring to the most widely adopted course management system among U.S. postsecondary institutions that can extend face-to-face learning into an online learning environment. She loves Gaggle. Her students love Gaggle. And they are getting ready for college and future workforce requirements. Each alone is good enough reason for House to try to incorporate it into her classroom: to have all three bears the mark of an enormous success. 9

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of Get Connected - April 2008

The End of a Bottleneck: OCPS’ New Network Contents A Letter From the President Not Your Average Library: New Carlisle, IN New Consortium Program Launches May 1 Hands-on Education Education Leaders Decry EETT Cuts Much More Than E-mail: Gaggle’s Other Apps Notes From the CTO

Get Connected - April 2008

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