Google Communities in the Classroom
This week we downloaded and explored the Google+ Communities app on our iPads. I've learned through this course that Google has so many apps out there that I've never heard of that are really cool. I really liked this one in particular, it kind of seems like a more professional social media in a way. You can join communities where you can post things to the page yourself and see others peoples posts as well. You can discuss different ideas, post questions or concerns, etc. You can also follow pages for different things, where the company or organization is the one posting, similar to Twitter. I joined a few school-related communities, such as Education, Google Classroom, and Scholarships. And a few that interested me, Scuba Diving and Skydiving. There are so many more communities beyond just the ones I joined. There is one for nearly every app, topic, etc. I like the classroom ones that I joined and I think it could be extremely useful as a teacher and as a student. From the teaching aspect, it can be useful by being able to ask questions frequently and getting responses from other teachers in a timely manner. For example, in the Google Classroom Community, teachers posts problems or concerns they are having with the Google Classroom App and how they can fix their issue, like in the screenshot on the right. It basically just serves as a discussion board for different topics.
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I also joined a community called Scholarships. This can be useful for students who are getting ready to go to college or are already in college. After going through and reading some of the posts in this community, I saw that they frequently post links to different scholarships that students can apply for and different ways to earn scholarships. This can be extremely useful for students who don't know where to being to look for scholarships, since it can be very overwhelming. Scholarships are an important part of college for a lot of students and can even determine if a student is able to go to college if they can't afford it with one. So, being a part of a community such as this one, can be an encouraging place for students to look for scholarships. On the community itself, it includes links to directly apply and it also specifies what major or university the scholarship is directed towards to help students know which ones they can apply for. One of the links from a post on the community's page is this one: scholarship-positions.com/full-tuition-mccloy-academic-scholarship-program-harvard-kennedy-school-usa/2017/06/30/ . The site includes all the scholarship requirements, what the student will be rewarded if they receive it, and how to apply.
Another feature Google Communities has is a way for you to create your own community. This reminds me a lot of Google Classroom, which we used earlier in this course. Students and teachers could use this in a classroom by creating a page to discuss group projects from home (if accessible) or just a classroom community in general for students to ask questions. This could be useful if the teacher can't promise a timely response, they can post it on their classroom's community and another student could potentially answer quickly. As for the teaching side, an example of when you could use this could be if you are absent and have a substitute, you can speak directly to your students through this app. You can post links, assignments, videos, images, etc. for you students to use.