When I left my former school district, I was clutching my Google Apps for Education certification in my hand, waving it proudly and enthusiastically. Working in a newly-converted GAFE district was a great opportunity. The high school in which I worked had just deployed Chromebooks for the juniors and seniors, while the freshmen and sophomores used iPads. I loved Google Apps for Education, adored my Chromebook and idolized Google Classroom. Working in a special education classroom, and following some students into their college-prep classes to assist them, I saw immediately how some tools in Google Apps would be game-changers for the students as well as their teachers.
When I began my new job last August, I found myself in an Office 365 district. I had never even heard of Office 365 before my interview. Most of my O365 training was done frantically in the beginning of the year, on my own, while I watched every training video I could find online. I searched for blog posts, articles, instructional videos and tutorials to help me understand what Office 365 is, and what it can do in the classroom. I started this research believing that Office 365 was a step down from Google Apps for Education and that I would just have to suck it up until I could convince my boss to move to Google. It took me quite a few months into the school year to realize how much I liked Office 365, and a little longer to not feel guilty about cheating on Google. Office 365 has some great tools and the possibilities of using it in the classroom are endless, just like Google Apps for Education. I can (usually) admit when I’m wrong, at least to myself, and I began to embrace the fact that I was becoming an Office 365 fan-girl. The most frustrating part of using Office 365 is the feeling that we are a minority in the field. More and more districts, entire states and colleges/universities are adopting Office 365. But Google is still more well-known, and information about how to use Google Apps in the classroom is to be all over the web. At conferences that I’ve attended this year, many workshops and sessions are titled as Google sessions. Workshops such as, “Teaching Research Skills Using Google Apps in the Classroom,” “Differentiating Instruction in Your Classroom using Google Apps, etc.” sound great and are easy to find. When some of my teachers see these workshops in conference listings, they assume that the information won’t apply to them because we don’t use Google Apps. I wish that these sessions were called, “Teaching Research Skills Using Technology,” or, “Differentiating Instruction in The Cloud,” or even the clunky-sounding, “Using Cloud-Based Services to Do Amazing Things in Your Classroom.” Maybe those are not the best titles, but the goal of the workshops isn’t truly to understand or use Google to do research or differentiate. The goal is to help teachers learn new tools to do these things. If you can design a menu to help differentiate your math curriculum using Google, you can do it in Office 365 just as easily! I am not saying that Google and Microsoft offer the exact same tools, but there is very little that you can do in one and can’t do in the other. What are some awesome things that can be done in the cloud to help teachers organize, collaborate, instruct, etc. in their classrooms? Create Writers Workshops, assign multimedia projects, teach research skills, encourage digital note-take, design exit tickets – the list goes on forever. Learning how to do these things, and using the cloud and technology to do them, will benefit every teacher. Let’s not focus on which company we use, but rather what we can accomplish using these fantastic tools. Let’s broaden our common understanding and language. We want to do the same kinds of things for our students, and it doesn’t matter what we use as long as we get there.
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AuthorMom to two sons, married 23 years to college sweetie. Instructional Technology Specialist for a vocational high school. Educator for 20+ years. Love to read, do anything crafty, and spend time with friends and family. Passionate about education, technology, and the combination of the two! I'm a proud foster-failure with Big Fluffy Dog Rescue, having fallen head-over-heels for our first foster and adopting her :) Archives
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