Week 7 Productivity, Communication, and Collaboration

          There has been a big change in education and in the way teachers are asked to prepare materials from when I first started teaching. When I began teaching, I was given the standard blue colored plan book and the green colored grade book. All lessons plans were submitted by taking a photocopy of the plan book for that week and passing in the hard copy to the administration. Today, plan books and grade books are given only by request. All lesson plans are now submitted electronically, as well as all the grades for middle and high school students. In order to accomplish this, the district has made a change to different programs, or software, to allow teachers to input student grades, modify grades, create lesson plans and share with the administration, and allows administration to access these programs to obtain the grades to print progress reports and report cards.  

In an attempt to make it easier for students and teachers to gain access to their work on different computers, the school department started using cloud-based systems for about the past five years. The cloud-based programs allow teachers, administration, and students to create documents and other projects on one computer, save their work, access their work on another device, share with other users, and collaborate with other users. Google Apps is the main cloud-based system that is in use. Teachers submit lesson plans by creating a shared folder within Google Docs, an app within Google Apps, that the fine arts director can check, as well as my colleagues in the music department. This is helpful in sharing lessons and keeping track of where each teacher is in the curriculum in case of a student transfer. For example, this past school year, there was a student that transferred from one middle school into the middle school that I teach at. I was able to access the music teacher’s lesson plans to see what she has covered thus far. This way I am aware of the student should know and if I need to catch her up to where I am at in the curriculum.

Like many school districts, they are always looking for ways to save money. One way they decided to save some money was to no longer pay for Microsoft Office Suite subscriptions for the teacher computers and Microsoft Word subscriptions for all student computers. Instead, the districted uses Google Docs for all word processing. This becomes helpful when working on documents that are for use throughout the district. They can be typed in Google Docs then shared with the other teachers. This way each teacher can print the amount of forms they need without waste. Another advantage is teachers can share documents with students. Students can create documents, take a quiz or test, or complete a worksheet and share it with the teacher. Since making the switch to using only Google Docs for word processing, there has been a huge reduction in the amount of copy paper that is used throughout the school year.

          The main way all of the music teachers and the fine arts director set all of the concert dates, and any other district events is by using Google Calendar. The fine arts director sets up a calendar and shares it with all of the staff. This digital calendar “… will sync their data among devices, so once entered, the information is available on one’s computer, phone, tablet, and so on” (Bauer, 2014, p.169). This means that everyone who wants to access the calendar can do so on any of their devices. I can add in my concert dates and everyone the calendar is shared with can see what I have added on their device. This has helped us all coordinate our concerts throughout the district without having multiple concerts on one night. Having access to this calendar on my phone allows me to sync this calendar with my own personal calendar as well. This way I only have to access one calendar instead of having to look at multiple calendars.

          The program that is used for grading students also includes the students email, parent email and phone numbers. This is very useful because I can quickly click on a specific class and send emails to students, parents, or both groups and send information about upcoming concerts, advocacy, permission slips, or any other important information. This also makes it easier for students and teachers to send emails to me as well with any questions or concerns they have.

Bauer, W. I. (2014). Music learning today digital pedagogy for creating performing

and responding to music. New York, NY Oxford University Press.