Volume 57, Number 6 TechTrends • November/December 2013 57

AbstractA cloud-based computing environment,

Google Apps for Education (GAFE), has pro-vided the Anaheim City School District (ACSD) a comprehensive and collaborative avenue for creating, sharing, and editing documents, calen-dars, and social networking communities. With this environment, teachers and district staff at ACSD are able to utilize the deep feature-set to assist with the implementation of the Common Core State Standards and the new shift in re-search-based lesson design. Through the use of the cloud-based computing environment, teach-ers in the district are able to receive support for the effective implementation of the Common Core State Standards.

Keywords: Cloud-Based Computing, Google Apps for Education, Common Core State Stan-dards, Elementary School, Teacher Support

ith the impending full implementa-tion of the Common Core State Stan-dards (CCSS) looming on the horizon,

many districts are determining how to best provide teacher training and on-going support for implementing these standards. The district where I work—Anaheim City School District (ACSD)—is no different. We began developing training and a support system in 2011. I have been deeply involved with this process from the

Using a Cloud-based Computing Environment to Support Teacher Training on Common Core ImplementationBy Cory Robertson, Anaheim City School District, Anaheim, California

W

support side as a Teacher on Special Assign-ment for Technology and Assessment This ar-ticle provides a discussion of how the Anaheim City School District has worked through this process to determine the most effective system to support its teachers in the implementation of the CCSS. The goal is to share how the district uses a cloud-based computing environment to provide support and training to teachers on the use of the Common Core State Standards.

Communicating the Shift to the Common Core State Standards

The district-level personnel at ACSD re-ceived the first formal training on the Common Core State Standards in the summer of 2011. This training was a comprehensive overview of the CCSS. The training included what the stan-dards were, how they differed from previous standards, how they were created, and who cre-ated them. Included in the training was a collec-tion of other information that included support materials, appendices, and resources necessary to fully understand the depth and width of the new standards.

After this initial training, Wendy Sales, a curriculum specialist for ACSD and trainer on the implementation of the CCSS, knew that the successful implementation of the CCSS would require the district to revamp the standard in-

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person training model that the district followed. With the amount of new information teachers needed to know and stay current on, she could not simply pull teachers in for a 3-hour ses-sion, provide them with handouts, and have the teachers go back to the classroom with the hope that they would meaningfully implement the CCSS. Teachers would need on-going support that was dynamic.

One of the first issues that needed to be re-solved was how to communicate to a staff of 650 teachers what the new standards were. Teachers needed to have continuous access to a variety of information and resources about the CCSS. When new information and resources become available, teachers need to be able to access it. In the past, the sharing of documents district-wide was done through Docushare, a fee-based ser-vice from Xero. This system allowed for docu-ments to be stored online, managed by specific owners, and accessed by users based on their login credentials. The system worked well, but the yearly-cost became prohibitive. As a result, the district did not have a reliable system in place to store and share resources.

The second major issue that needed to be addressed was how to provide for a collaborative environment where teachers could discuss and analyze the standards. Teachers needed time to dissect the new standards in order to determine what students truly were being asked to do. This process would help teachers have a better un-derstanding of the standards, which would lead to instruction being created that helps students meet the standards.

Selecting A Cloud-Based Environment

The district knew that the successful imple-mentation of the CCSS would require that these two issues be resolved. The desire was to have a digitally based environment where teachers could collaborate and communicate. The district explored various cloud-based computing envi-ronments. Prior to the summer of 2011, the dis-trict was running Microsoft Office 2003 (or ear-lier versions) that required a costly update. Addi-tionally, the Exchange servers that were handling the e-mail system were due for an upgrade. When considering these two elements together, the cost to upgrade the software and the servers was sig-nificant. This prompted questions and concerns about the cost. Were local machine-specific files still meeting the needs of the staff? Would there be a need to also upgrade the servers that each school site used to store these files? As the moves

to 1:1 or Bring Your Own Device were on the ho-rizon, would the Microsoft updates be compat-ible or even cost-efficient? Questions like these led to numerous discussions about how the dis-trict would move forward.

During these discussions, there became an increased focus on Google Apps for Education (GAFE). Microsoft 365 was just getting off the ground, and appeared—at the time—to have fewer options and features than GAFE. At this time, there were no other comprehensive op-tions for the district to explore. Therefore, it was determined that with Google’s ability to provide a robust e-mail system, a document system that was accessible anywhere, and feature-rich col-laborative options—all provided free—GAFE was a service worth exploring. Anaheim City School District eventually switched the entire staff to GAFE by the end of the summer of 2011.

Supporting Teacher Training on Common Core Implementation Using a Cloud-Base Environment

Supporting teachers in the implementa-tion of the CCSS requires that teachers have a clear understanding of how the standards are organized and what the standards require of stu-dents. A major activity that teachers need to be involved with when any new standards are in-troduced is to deconstruct the standards. This activity involves teachers—grouped by grade level—dissecting the language of a standard to isolate the skill (typically the verb in the stan-dard) and the concept (typically the noun). This activity helps teachers see what students are truly expected to do, and allows teachers to create in-struction that helps students meet the standards.

Let us look at how this can might be done with a fourth grade CCSS ELA standard Read-ing for Information 4.1: Refer to details and ex-amples in a text when explaining what the text says explicitly and when drawing inferences from the text. Deconstructing this standard, teachers would need to isolate the skills and the corre-sponding concepts. A group of teachers might pull out refer to as the skill, and details and ex-amples as the concepts. They may also identify drawing inferences as another skill. This infor-mation allows teachers to determine the level of questioning they should use with students, as well as the level of responses they should receive. From here, teachers can start to develop big ideas and essential questions—questions posed to stu-dents and answers from students that help guide instruction and demonstrate their knowledge. This activity eventually will lead to teachers cre-

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ating units of study that will be implemented into the classroom.

In past years, this activity occurred with Mi-crosoft Office when teachers worked to decon-struct the California State Content Standards. Teachers broke into pairs with each pair tackling a standard. The teachers used Microsoft Word to type out the results of deconstructing the stan-dards. The documents the teacher pairs com-pleted were then e-mailed to Wendy, who then spent the next two to three days compiling the information, as well as fixing formatting issues, from five pairs of teachers across seven grade levels resulting in 35 different documents.

With the adoption of GAFE into the district, the implementation of this activity changed. One document per each grade level was made using Google Docs. It was then shared with all the teachers at that grade level. Teachers were still broken into pairs by grade level, but rather than each teacher working on a separate document all teachers in one grade level worked on the shared Google Doc. As teachers worked and questions or concerns came up, the teachers were able to examine the shared collaborative document to determine how their peers were addressing the standards. This allowed for real-time collabora-tion as well as facilitating communication that allowed the process to move along faster than it had in previous years.

Supporting Instructional Development to Address the Common Core Using a Cloud-based Environment

Once teachers had a working understanding of the standards and what they their students were being asked to accomplish, it was necessary for the teachers to have guidance and resources on how to best teach these standards. A com-mittee of seventy classroom teachers was con-vened and asked to develop a unit of instruction around a specific set of the standards. This unit would serve as a pilot for the 2012-13 school year on implementing the Common Core State Standards. The unit eventually would serve as a template for further unit creation by teachers in the district.

The trainers for this committee, Wendy Sales and Katie Keichline, knew from their prior experiences with Google Apps for Education, that given the amount of documents, revisions, and participants that would be involved with this immense task, the key to successful collabo-ration and communication among the teacher

would be the use of GAFE. Keichline indicated that, “There was time saved in comparison to previous years when we have created units. This collaborative effort allowed us to see what we were creating during the process of creating it was very powerful, especially in terms of editing while we worked.”

GAFE became the foundation for all work conducted over the next three to four months in constructing these new units. Unit documents were shared with all teachers on the committee, but only those who were at the appropriate grade level were given write-access to the documents. This allowed for all teachers to view other grade levels’ work, without increasing the likelihood that something may get deleted or lost while re-viewing. As with deconstructing the standards, chunking the work between multiple pairs at a grade level was imperative to making the task efficient. The real-time editing feature allowed teachers working on one portion of the unit to constantly have access to see what the other pairs were creating to ensure the entire time that the unit became a cohesive and consistent resource for teachers.

With so many individuals simultaneously editing and working with important docu-ments, there naturally arose a fear about what would happen if someone deleted all or changed parts of a document. This was handled through Google Doc’s Revision History function that keeps track of every major change made to the document from the most recent edit, all the way back to the very day the document was created--even if that was two years ago. Not only was this feature useful, it was essential. With the amount of teachers working on the units all at various times, it was necessary to use the Restore to This Version feature to help revert the document back to its last correct state.

The restore feature, with its purpose of pro-viding a fail-safe for unwanted changes, had an-other important role to play for the district. Ac-cording to Wendy Sales, “The ability to view the historical evolution of the documents has been beneficial beyond measure. The amount of time saved and the increased accuracy as a result of these features was instrumental to the process.” Without this feature, ideas that may not have fit in the initial drafts of the product but became es-sential later on through the evolution of the unit would have been lost or difficult to find. Teach-ers working on the units would not have been able to go back into the archives and pull pieces of writing back into the newest revision.

It seemed, as the committee’s work moved on, that the number of teachers working on these

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documents was going to always be problematic. As the committee finished its initial work, sub-committees of classroom teachers were formed to look at specific parts of the units to put touch-es on the units before they were presented to the entire teaching staff for piloting. These subcom-mittees consisted of teachers looking at just the assessments; a subcommittee was assigned to look at the tasks (what the students are asked to do throughout the unit) and make sure that they were authentic and true to the spirit of the Common Core State Standard that the task ad-dressed; and a subcommittee was assigned to re-evaluate previous work done almost a year prior on the actual instructional pacing of the CCSS. What this meant, unfortunately, was that some teachers who originally worked on the units were not going to be present at these subcom-mittee meetings to elaborate on or explain their initial thinking; and, some teachers who were on these new subcommittees were not initially part of the first, seventy-teacher committee.

The commenting feature in Google Drive became a necessary tool to help track not just what changes were made, but why those changes were made. This allowed teachers not previously part of the unit design committee to have a bet-ter understanding of the rationale for decisions made. Teachers were able to ask questions, and responses were posted could be posted to the questions. Additionally, as teachers saw issues that needed to be resolved, they tagged a section of the document needing following-up, and Ka-tie or Wendy were able to make those changes, toggle the comment from the teacher as resolved, and leave a response as to what was or was not done, and why. This iterative and collaborative process allowed for robust instructional units to be created around the CCSS.

Considering Issues of a Cloud-Based Computing Environment

Though Google Apps for Education pro-vided many viable solutions that helped my district communicate and train teachers about the CCSS and allowed teachers to collaborate on the creation of new instructional units based on the CCSS, GAFE was not without its shortcom-ings. There arose situations where other options might have been better options. One of the most common complaints about GAFE has been the lack of formatting options in Google Docs. Cur-rently, there does not exist a way to insert a float-ing image, text boxes, overlapping text features, or advanced table features. It is also not possible to merge cells in a Document. While there exist

many posts on GAFE’s knowledge base request-ing these features, and some previously absent features such as commenting, formulas, and fonts have been added; it is not immediately ap-parent as to whether or not these missing fea-tures will be included in future versions of Drive.

Another issue the district ran into was that Drive has a steep learning curve when it comes to accessing and sharing documents. The teach-ers were very familiar with accessing their docu-ments via a Windows Explorer framework, and were even quite savvy at dragging-and-dropping files into shared network folders for others to access. The format for accessing documents in Drive, however, is different. Files are listed lin-early, sorted based on a filter (e.g., Last Modi-fied, Last Modified by Me, Name) and Collections rather than the term folder is used to describe a grouping of files. Applications like DropBox and Box.net offered, at the time, a much more famil-iar user experience. Users could simply drag-and-drop their files into the DropBox folder that they had designated to be shared with specific co-workers, and the files were accessible imme-diately. GAFE has now launched a desktop ver-sion of Drive, allowing users to drag and drop files to save to the cloud; however, teachers in the district have reported various issues with this application, and it has yet to receive a full implementation plan from ACSD.

ConclusionDespite these issues, it was determined that

Google Apps for Education offered the best, over-all experience for the staff. Teachers were able to receive on-going support as they were working through understanding what is involved with the CCSS and how it would change what they needed to do in the classroom. GAFE allowed for teach-ers to be provided with access to a wealth of re-sources to help with this transition to the CCSS. As a free, all-in-one cloud-based environment—albeit with some quirks—GAFE helped increased the collaborative efforts of the staff and provided for increased levels of communication about the CCSS and its implementation.

Cory Robertson has worked in the Anaheim City School District for over 13 years. He has worked as a Technology Assistant, providing technical support at school sites; as a 5th Grade teacher; and in his current position, a Teacher on Special Assignment for Technology and Assessment, pro-viding training in support in the implementation of tech-nology in K-6 classes at 24 school sites. He earned his MS in Educational Technology from California State University, Fullerton in 2012.