GTACHI Reflections

It's hard to know where to begin in describing the Google Teacher Academy experience. As is often said, the two-day experience moves incredibly quickly, and you can be sure that all of our heads were already spinning from scripting, extensions, and maps by our first lunch. But the experience was incredible, largely thanks to the exceptional academy participants and lead learners, and without doubt I'll be reflecting on it for quite some time.

Overview

+Becky Evans and +Danny Silva began the academy by making the point that a Google Certified Teacher is an "ambassador for change" in the educational community, which is the most important quality of a GCT. That's to say, a GCT is about community.

Before we moved along to our breakout sessions, +Cory Pavicich reiterated that "You don’t know what you want to learn," underscoring the fact that learning is a process.

In the "Life of a Googler" session, Brian Fitzpatrick, a technology evangelist, founder of Google Chicago, and author of Team Geek, had some interesting insights to share about technology and education. When it comes to Google's celebrated 20% time, “creativity loves constraint,” which is an idea that we should keep in mind when doing passion-based learning.

Discussing what Google looks for when hiring engineers, Fitzpatrick noted that “really good engineers are attracted to companies that have really hard problems.” To my mind, this attraction is based in the "flow" from working on a good problem, since we're happiest when we're doing productive work (cf. my thoughts on Csikszentmihalyi's "flow"). To put it simply, we need to find more flow for our students in our classrooms and make learning fun.

Most interestingly, Fitzpatrick said that, when evaluating ideas to pursue, Google tends to evaluate the ease of reversal for a particular idea, not whether it’s good or bad. Such an attitude toward innovation stands in sharp contrast to the way education works today. To many schools are so afraid of failure that innovation tends to be labored and painfully slow, rather than fun and exciting, and this is something we need to work on changing.

The breakout sessions, unconference, and other presentations, including the session on Google culture, were all fantastic, but I'll avoid allowing this post to grow too long, I'll leave them aside for now.

Reflections

Looking back, I wish I had talked with more people in the academy, and I think that several others feel the same way. Between learning from lead learners, working in our sessions, and recording ideas down, it was practically impossible to work the room and interact with others. But that's part of the GTA experience, I think, in that the academy serves to create connections that will outlast the academy itself.

During our closing reflections, Team Goodyear was in agreement about our ultimate take-away from the experience, namely, that "it's not about the tools we've learned about. It's about the connections and conversations that we're going to have as a part of this community." I'm very excited to join the GCT community and discover what I don't yet know and continue to explore new ideas.

Fortunately, much of our conversations were recorded on Twitter and can be found in the #gtachi Twitter archive, #gtachi tag map, and session notes (thanks to +Ben Wilkoff for putting these together!), and +David Theriault's photoblog captured some of images of #gtachi. My GTACHI notes, however brief, are also open to be shared.

Ideas

I left GTACHI more resolved than ever to try two ideas this coming fall:

• First, based on the successes of 20% time in both the corporate and educational worlds, I intend to give my 7th-grade Latin IA students regular time to explore Roman culture, including anything from architecture and geography, to social customs, to literature. Because "creativity loves constraint", I'll need to put boundaries on the projects. I'm eager to try "crowdsourcing" grading of the projects in some capacity that I'll report on later in the year.

I'll also give my 9th-grade Latin III class 20% time to explore topics in Greek and Latin literature, linguistics, and, perhaps most valuable of all, modern Classical reception. I'll ask them to record their 20% work in their blogs (on which cf. here), with the hopes that we can share them with wider audiences.

• Secondly, I'll experiment with the gamification of Latin IA, thanks to some help from +Catherine Flippen. In addition to Google Apps, our school uses the Canvas LMS, which is structured around modules and also offers a number of LTI apps to add to courses, including Mozilla's Open Badges.

Each module can be organized around a thematic unit like direct object marking, indirect-object marking, verb person/number, etc. As a hook to for each new module, we can offer some kind of puzzle or project to solve that will lead us to the next objective, including figuring out what an inscription says, finding a specific location on a map, and more. As students progress through each module, they can earn badges as they acquire necessary skills with grammar, vocabulary, culture, etc.

Action Plan

The final piece of the GTA is the action plan project for which we're supposed to "innovate, inspire, and lead" with the goal of "changing our world". Our action plans are intended to be collaboration pieces with other GCTs and encourage us to think big. I'll admit that I still don't have a clear idea for mine. Based on the community-first role of the GCT, though, I'm excited to use my action plan for community development.

I'm especially interested in independent-school community and some of the challenges they face, including professional development, and may design my action plan with this group in mind. However, I'm also involved in the Classics community and the #latinlangchat Twtter chat, and given the challenges that teaching Latin poses, I am interested in working with within this community to help connect Latin teachers, classrooms, and resources from around the world.

I'd love to trade ideas for action plans with anyone who's also thinking through them or offer whatever peer review I can for other action plans. Feel free to get in touch with me to start brainstorming.

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The GTACHI experience will stay with me for quite some time, and I hope to have the chance to pay it forward to others who want to take part in the kind of community that GTA creates. Thanks to all of the amazing educators who made GTACHI even better than advertised. I'm excited and eager to continue our conversations, and I look forward to the opportunity to meet you all again!