Joel Wagner
Joel Wagner (@sywtt) began teaching band in 2002. Though he had a lot of information, his classes were out of control. He found himself tired, frustrated, disrespected by students, lonely, and on the brink of quitting. He had had enough. He resigned from his school district right before spring break of his second year and made it his personal mission to learn to be a great teacher. So You Want To Teach? is the ongoing story of that quest for educational excellence.
I got my Google Wave invitation the day the first set of invites came out. Today on Twitter, a friend asked me if Google Wave was as amazing as he’s heard it is. My response was something along the lines of:
The potential of Google Wave is still pretty amazing, but the implementation of it so far is not there.
That being said, I have to keep in mind that it is still in alpha testing phases right now, and thought it has been unresponsive at times, it has not yet crashed on me. These two facts are pretty solid for the infrastructure so far!
What is the potential? Well, clearly it has some pretty far-reaching possibilities in the use of collaborative education and group work in computer-enabled classrooms. But I’ve been thinking about some other school implementations that could be possible:
- Curriculum planning
- Departmental communications
- Intercampus
- Plan parent conferences with multiple teachers and multiple schedules
- Share links to web resources
- Campus improvement planning
- Schoolwide calendar/scheduling
- Faculty meeting follow-up
- Teacher appraisal sign-ups
- To-do lists
- Keep information current between work, cell, and home
- School newspaper/newsletter article development
- Local newspaper publicity article development
- Twitter-like communication between faculty without the Twitter-like time drain
- Share lesson plans with substitutes/administrators/department chairs/other teachers
Besides the school-related uses, I can imagine some others:
- Collaborative book study (I’ve started a Bible study with friends this way – copy a chapter or so, add friends to the wave, add some comments/links/videos)
- Group blogging
- List of music educators (this could also include math teachers, administrators, whatever)
- Storing favorite web resources in one central searchable location (the archive is an amazing feature of Gmail)
If these ideas have been done, let us know in the comments. Also, if you have some other ideas for great uses of Google Wave, share them in the comments as well.
In time when its use becomes more widespread I can't wait to develop texts with students. You know, like turning a C standard essay into a B standard one. Working with staff to brainstorm ideas and write units would become so much easier too.