Google Classroom PD #MTBoSBlaugust

Friday, another teacher and I taught a PD to 36 teachers, many of whom were not interested in what we had to offer.  Let me back up and explain how this came about.

At the end of the school year I had a discussion with my Principal about wanting to use Google Classroom in my class this year.  I was excited to do more research over the summer.  He mentions having a PD on it at some point.  Fast forward to July 24th when I was looking over our back to school pre-planning schedule.  I texted our Math Coach to see if he could move the math PD because two of us math teachers wanted to ATTEND the Google Classroom PD at the same time.  It was about 15 minutes later that he informed me that I was going to be CO-TEACHING the GClassroom PD!

So I set about planning to meet the other teacher to plan.  I had created a class called Staff Development.  He made an agenda (google doc) and an announcement while I created a google form and google sheet.

I discussed with admin that if GClassroom wasn't going to be mandatory, then we needed to offer it to only those interested.  The entire staff was told to attend.  As with any technology, two things happened: they had difficulty signing onto the Chromebooks and many teachers were immediately overwhelmed!  I did learn a couple things though: Chromebooks won't let you sign in if the date is wrong (I still don't know why or how the date was wrong!) and if you want teachers to be students in a class, they must first be a teacher of at least one class (which caused us to have to email our IT people).

I was extremely frustrated as this was my first opportunity to conduct a training at my current school and I felt it was a total flop!  After the overview, we allowed those teachers that were not interested in more information to go work in their rooms.  We were left with about 8 of the interested teachers.  I told a few of my close teacher/friends, including the new math coach, that I thought it was a complete failure.  They all reassured me that it was an awesome training, and that they always expect the technology issues that I had no control over.

The math coach said his wife enjoyed it and learned a lot.  He said I was being hard on myself.  We discussed setting up other opportunities for me to train teachers possibly on their planning periods, but only for those that are interested.  I'm looking forward to doing these smaller trainings.