Google Drive is something I’ve talked endlessly about on this blog, but today I’m going to share with you how we used it at my last school. This school was located in Guatemala City, and although many Americans might imagine it’s something of a backwater [in some regards, it still is], our school was pretty high-tech in some areas. One was use of Google Drive. We adopted it a few years ago as a means of submitting weekly lesson plans. Instead of teachers killing trees! printing out weekly lesson plans to put in a folder that then had to be hand delivered to the office of the coordinator and then picked up from their mailbox once reviewed, all the department heads created a folder for each teacher, in which lesson plans were created and made accessible to those with viewing and commenting rights. As a teacher, this was great because, for one, I was already using Google Drive, but also because it saved me the step of running my lesson plans around from person to person each week. I just created one document within the appropriate folder, added the next week’s lessons, and awaited comments and suggestions from both my department head and my coordinator. This saved so much time, and stress. Then, if I still needed to come to someone’s office (for example, when my department head offered to share a book of graphic organizers with me, or curriculum related to UN Human Rights), I can do so, but it’s much less than before. In the mean time, all relevant superiors can see exactly what’s going on in my classroom, and help guide me along the way to becoming a better teacher.
Amanda M. Orozco 