PRIMA Winter 2021 | Page 37

Google Forms in the Digital Classroom

Keith Toda
@ silvius _ toda
As this semester comes to an end , all I can say is , “ Wow , digital teaching is difficult ! Although I possess a graduate degree in Instructional Technology , I still feel like a first-year teacher when it comes to teaching in a hybrid-learning classroom setting . In all of this , the biggest lesson I learned was simply : This situation is completely new to both teachers and students , so it is okay to feel like I do not know what I am doing and to learn as I go . Once I embraced that fact , suddenly I was able to create realistic expectations for both myself and my students .
Instead of creating completely new classroom learning activities , my goal was to adapt as much as I already had to a digital setting , more specifically , a self-grading Google Form . I did this primarily for three reasons :
1 . I know how to create learning activities and assessments using Google Forms , so I might as well play to my strengths .
2 . This learning situation is new for students , and it is therefore not an appropriate time to introduce multiple new forms of technology . As a result , I need to limit the number of online tools used in class so that they feel comfortable with the technology which we are using .
3 . These work perfectly for asynchronous learning days .
Using Google Forms , I was able to create activities which addressed reading comprehension , sentence / picture matching , listening comprehension , emoji sentence matching , Latin derivatives / cognates , and video clips . Examples of how I used Google Forms in a digital Latin classroom setting can be found on my blog .
Keith Toda ( kttoda @ hotmail . com ) has been teaching Latin for over 20 years . A self-professed recovering grammar-translation teacher , Keith has been implementing comprehensible input in the Latin classroom since 2013 and regularly writes about his experiences on his blog Toda-lly Comprehensible Latin . Keith enjoys long walks on the beach at night .
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