Enhance Student Collaboration in your Google Classrooms with SMART amp

Our friends at SMART Technologies are guest posting today sharing SMART amp and how easy it integrates in Google Apps for Education. Jason and I have worked in amp for the past few years and are impressed with it’s seamless integration into GAFE. Jason and I would like to thank SMART for helping bring this year’s Tech-Savvy Teacher Portland Summit Featuring Google for Education to Portland! SMART will be on the vendor floor at NCCE 2017, make sure you stop by for a hands on with amp and all of their other fabulous products!

Are you using Chromebooks™ in your classroom?

If you’re a K-12 teacher in North America, you know that educators are looking for ways to ensure they and their students get as much educational value as possible from these devices.

It just so happens that there’s a SMART way to get your Chromebooks to better support your teaching style. Or perhaps we should say “teaching styles”, since today’s teachers constantly move back and forth between a wide variety of instructional models. It’s for this reason that SMART has designed solutions that not only support these models but ease the transitions between them.

Student-led learning with SMART amp

When students take the lead in learning activities, it’s important that they can create and consume content while working together. This can be a tall order, since collaboration on student devices can be tricky to manage. That’s where SMART amp comes in. It unites student devices for a shared learning experience, enabling multiple students and their teachers to collaborate, synchronously or asynchronously, in a digital content-rich, shared workspace.

This is extra good news for Chromebook users, because SMART amp is part of Google’s ecosystem in education and integrates seamlessly with solutions like Drive and Classroom. SMART amp workspace files auto-save to Google Drive, and an added plus is that they don’t count toward your Drive storage quota. You also don’t need to worry about managing another set of student user names and passwords, because Google Apps for Education integration lets students use their Google IDs to sign into SMART amp.

There are a bunch of other cool integration features, like the way that SMART amp workspace files act like Google documents when shared via Google Classroom. There’s also a Google Chrome app for SMART amp that lets administrators push out the software to all the school’s Chromebooks through the Chromebook Management Console. The way amp and Chromebooks work together is really something you should experience to grasp the full potential of what these tools can do in your students’ hands.

“Since SMART amp uses the Google platform, its use is fast and seamless on the Chromebook. I was especially impressed when I got to play with the touch screen Chromebooks at a SMART amp Camp! Being able to use gestures, write and manipulate with my fingers made the amp experience even more enjoyable. It’s the ability to annotate and move objects easily using the finger that has always made the SMART experience most accessible for students.” – Sandra Chow, Grade 5/6 Teacher, Joyce Public School

Integration features aside, SMART amp’s adaptability to multiple instructional models is where the software really shows its value. It lets teachers transition (with one click) between student-led, teacher-led, and guided instruction, all while keeping students engaged.

Supporting the instructional mix that’s right for your students At the end of the day, nobody knows what will support your students’ learning better than you do.

Depending on the group and the day, you’ll move from teacher-led, to guided, to student-led learning and from whole-class, to small-group, to individual instruction. The devices, software and displays in your classroom must should and enable that flexibility without getting in the way.

To get the most out of the Chromebooks you have, bringing together SMART amp as part of the SMART Learning Suite and SMART displays with solid professional development is a winning strategy. By enabling peer and group collaboration, student content-creation, formative assessment, and whole-class instruction with our solutions, you and your students will experience a vast new world of Chromebook learning moments, opportunities and possibilities.

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