The following grades are formative, meant to monitor effectiveness, provide feedback, and encourage goals both personal and in some cases corporate. These grades are not final, and can go up or down as the year progresses. 

Flipgrid: I’ve known about it for three years, but every year I always found an excuse not to try it out. Beyond the puzzling name (what’s being flipped here exactly?) I just didn’t feel comfortable asking students to record themselves trying to answer scholarly questions for all their peers to watch. And if students weren’t recording scholarly responses…what was the point of using it? Was I really going to watch all that content? I didn’t feel comfortable asking my students to do something I wouldn’t feel comfortable doing myself, and it only seemed fair to devote those type of discussion-based activity to in-class time. 

This fall, however, I’ve set aside any of those reservations. In a month of complete distance-learning, Flipgrid has been a great way to get to know my students. One of the first activities I do with them every year is to have each student bring to class a significant object and discuss why they brought it, what it means to them. It was an activity that transferred seamlessly to Flipgrid. Students talked charmingly about their objects. I allowed pets to be featured this year, and am I ever glad to have made that choice. Fiona the cat, Smokey the horse, Evan the dog were all memorably put on display. The students seemed to enjoy it as well, with most videos racking up close to a hundred views in each class without any direction from me. The students are experts at talking to a camera, and Flipgrid relieves the on-spot pressure of a synchronous Google Meet session. It’s easy to set up an account and create assignments. Overall, top marks for Flipgrid, with only a few points deducted for the name, which remains unappealing. A-    

Remind: Students were automatically enrolled at the beginning of the year in my sections, only to find out that not all of them were. That’s been the only noteworthy update in my use of this very helpful student-to-teacher client. I require that my students write their messages to me politely (salutation, thank yous, good grammar, etc) if they want me to respond outside of contract hours. This year, either the word has spread or students are becoming better at their electronic etiquette, because even before I went over that rule in my syllabus all student correspondence had reflected the height of manners. This boomer was happy. Remind is good, if sometimes tough to navigate on iPhone. B+  

WeVideo: Don’t let the name and the interface, both of which scream mid-2000s, fool you. This browser video-editing program has functionality to burn, and is fast enough enough to keep up with any modern educator’s go-go pandemic lifestyle. My wife, a careerlong user of iMovie, is even thinking of making the switch, after hearing me brag like a proud papa about the speed at which my videos are processed and made available in Drive (generally speaking, it takes as long as the length of the video). It was an invaluable tool last week when I edited together the SCA/PEER video, never once crashing even though I had several gigs of two-minute video submissions in the que. 

While there are plenty of video-editing programs that can produce a more polished product, WeVideo satisfies the needs of most educators have right now, and it does it with an easy-to-use interface that almost never crashes*.   

You can also use WeVideo to record lectures. It has the option of recording both your camera and the screen at the same time, producing two separate video files that can then be manipulated after recording. I finally tried this out a few nights ago and was overall pleased with the results. Anything was better than what I had been dealing with, which was two bad weeks with Google Meets trying to record lectures and getting back videos with choppy audio. 

*WeVideo did crash in the middle of recording a section of my lecture, which did not auto-save and I was forced to re-record. I will allow that this may have been more a problem with my internet speed and less a problem with the program itself. 

Overall, a strong first month for this overachiever. A

Outlook: The search feature is terrible, the calendar is difficult to manage. I can literally feel it making my phone heavier.  C-        

PearDeck: My experience with PearDeck is currently linked to my Google Meet experience, for better or worse — currently worse. I want to use it for formative feedback during class, but I don’t want it to come at the expense of getting booted out of my own class every time I try to present my screen to the class, which has been the experience thus far. I’m going to figure out how to make it work.  N/A  

Google Meet: Without it, we wouldn’t have any online instruction, so I shouldn’t complain too much. It wasn’t designed for this amount of heavy use, and credit to Google for consistently seeking feedback and updating the interface on a weekly basis. 

That said, it became clear after the first week that using Google Meets for class was going to require at least two computers: one to host the class, and one to do everything else. My internet in Winchester can just barely keep up with thirty students in the room. Occasionally I get booted out, especially if I’m trying to present slides. So I direct students to follow along with the slides on their own devices, which has worked well so far, and frankly it keeps the students that much more engaged during a lecture, since they’re tasked with following along.  

One day last week my voice started becoming glitchy, according to the students. This issue was resolved when I stopped using my school-issued device. I’ve heard of similar problems stemming from the school-issued device. 

My Lang kids have been fantastic about keeping their cameras on and participating in discussions. Not so much my English 12 students, but I’m still pleased at them for showing up, sticking to business, asking questions, and even participating in the chat when prompted…and prompted some more…and me awkwardly waiting for a response in the chat.  

A few students have blanks in their Phoenix picture and never turn on their cameras, so I have been engaging with them for almost a month without knowing anything about them other than their name and what they produce in class. It’s almost a throwback to the snail mail correspondence classes I’ve heard mentioned by old timers. 

All told, Google Meets gets the job done, as long as you have some deep patient breaths to spare. B-

Schoology: We can be hyperbolic, us teachers. We can be very protective of our tools with which we use to teach. Take away Google Classroom and replace it with some ersatz mashup of Classroom, Facebook, and Blackboard, and you have to expect a certain amount of protest. Combine that with the unfortunate timing of the roll out, and…well. 

Working with Schoology over the summer and over the past month with students, I am reminded of the D.L. Moody quote: “The best way to show that a stick is crooked is not to argue about it or to spend time denouncing it, but to lay a straight stick alongside it.” It’s only when it’s gone that you appreciate how Google Classroom got so many little things right. I’m sure Schoology makes life easier for a certain percentage of individuals at the macro level, but down here in the trenches, I miss the ease with which you could post, schedule, and critique assignments. I miss how you could post an assignment in multiple classes without having to go into each class and re-attach the materials. I didn’t bother creating custom buttons for my sections, but I felt bad for those who did and then had to deal with them not working the first week of class, which at the elementary level was more than just a superficial problem: it meant students couldn’t see where they needed to go for their next class.   

I don’t know the whole story behind why Schoology was purchased, or really any of the story, other than it happened. I believe most issues are multifaceted and deserve as much context as possible. That said, it’s never a good sign when you have to resort to that logic. 

Personally, I haven’t asked a lot out of Schoology, and my own gripes have been pretty limited in comparison to some of my colleagues. Next week, though, I’ll be using Schoology’s Turnitin add-on, which, by the way, is the third different iteration of that program in as many years. (Technology!) But for now, my grade reflects my own somewhat limited experience with Schoology. C+