What Would Google Do?

The last several chapters that we have read in our book have talked about giving people control to use things and figure out what needs to be changed to make these things better. If you don't listen to the people using your products, you will loose them. We think that this is also true in education. If students do not feel that they are a part of their learning process, you will loose them. It is important to ask students what they would like to learn and how they would like to learn it. This gives them a sense of ownership and they will make it their own.
Mistakes that are made are leaning opportunities. This is a message that we should be sending to our students. We do not expect them to be perfect-we are not. Everyday we make mistakes, sometime in front of our students, and do we expect them to not believe in us anymore because of those mistakes? No, that makes us human. Just like them.
One very interesting fact that we learned is that Google gives its technical employees the chance to use 20 percent of their time to work on new ideas, new products, and new business. Wow!! Can you imagine the amount of teaching and learning things that we could search for, find, and produce with 20 percent of our school year. We feel that is the greatest drawback to the teaching profession-no planning and preparation time. Everything must be done outside of the school day and by then you are exhausted from doing your job.
Google says that we should first find problems and then create the solutions to solve them. We think that the schools systems are trying to do this, but going at a snail's pace.

Group Member: Anglea Hick, Laura Schwiebert, and Staci Tatum