Together with John Stevens and Karl Lindgren-Streicher, I’ve been brainstorming an interesting way to apply for the Google Teacher Academy for months.
As of August, our plan was a rap with a beat we composed, referencing each other in our videos and starring in quick cameos.
We quickly realized three things as the deadline for Austin was announced.
- The beat that we (okay… the beat that I) composed was not very good. Making it good enough would take longer than I wanted to spend, plus there are tons of Creative Commons-licensed songs for free download if you’re a teacher.
- The rap would limit our creativity, and we’d have three nearly identical videos instead of three that showcased our unique classrooms and educational philosophy.
- One minute is not very much time at all.
So we made a Voxer channel, made a shared folder in Google Drive and gave each other editing rights, and asked for feedback.
This is from Karl’s doc. He brought some other Edu-ringers in as well.
Let me stress; this is a microcosm of the same attitude that has grown all three of us into the educators that we are today. We ask peers for help and drink it up when we get it.
Between Voxer (where we dropped any and all inspiration we had and bounced ideas off each other) and the shared Docs (which I won’t share with you, so stop asking), we each took the general concepts that the three of us shared and fine-tuned them to be specific to ourselves.
We encouraged and trimmed ideas in equal measure, and at the end, we had three very different videos that showcase three very similar mindsets.
In short, we actually modeled the collaboration that we promote to our teachers while we made a video about collaboration with teachers.
Here’s mine:
When I showed my video to Karl and John, they both said, “Yep. That’s Vaudrey.”
Here are their videos, too:
The best part? I just wore the fairy costume and went about my regular day as EdTech Coach.
I trained students on Google Forms and URL shorteners.
I met with a teacher to help her utilize web resources for 3rd grade Social Studies.
The only real weird part of the shoot was that I’m still new to the district;
many of these teachers hadn’t met me in person before I was putting on glitter wings in the teacher’s lounge.
“Hi, are you Wendy? I’m Matt; did you email me about iPads? Also, can you zip me?”
Also priceless were the student responses to the Google Fairy walking through campus.
Elementary School: “It’s a fairy man! Hi, Fairy Man!”
Middle School: “Oh! It’s… uh… he’s the Google Fairy. Aren’t you hot?”
High School: “I love your costume! [Takes picture]
High School: “What the f***?”
~Matt “Google Fairy” Vaudrey
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