Stretching Out of Students' Minds with the Google A Week Contest

     A couple of years ago, I attended a Google Summit in Conway, Arkansas with a group of teachers from my school.  We left with a passel of ideas about how we could infuse our curriculum with Google Apps for Education.  The two hour drive home featured a series of conversations casting a vision for what our school could be like if we implemented Google tools at Lakeside.  Looking back on the conference, it was an event which has profoundly shaped how instruction is delivered at my school.

     One of the concepts I learned about at the Google Summit was the Google A Day contest.  In its original form, I would selected one of the questions from the Google A Day and use it for the Google A Week contest on my campus.  The Google Question of the Week has evolved to focus on current events and curricular topics.  It has become a popular addition to the daily announcement broadcast.  Over time, the Google Question of the Week has become a staple of the library program.

How it works

     Each Monday, a new question is posted on the daily school wide video broadcast as well as on posters throughout the school halls.  Students have until Friday at the end of the school day to turn in their name, the correct answer, and the website where the answer came from on a slip of paper.

      On Fridays, right before I leave for the day, I sift the answers and pile up the correct ones.  Then one correct answer is selected at random as the Google a Week winner.  Sometimes I will also enlist the help of a library patron who is present in the last period of the day to select the winner.  The winner is announced on next week's campus wide video broadcast.  Each week's winner is also entered in the Google A Week Championships (or G.A.W. CHA)  which is held in the Spring each year.  To read more about this event, check out this blog post about it. http://bit.ly/2eIZuHU

      Frequently the questions are related to current events, topics students are studying in class or an obscure story I heard on public radio during my morning commute.  I will often hear from students when they see the question-"we just talked about that in class the other day!"  It ends up being a research opportunity even if they think they remember the answer since they are required to locate a web based source for their information.  It also provides another opportunity for teachers and students to discuss what they are learning.  This is also an easy way to document how we are supporting the school's instructional program as a library media specialist.

     Usually I will make adjustments from the original question to make it "unGoogleable".  For example, I located the question: What was America's best selling book in 2016?  To make this question "unGoogleable", I refocused the question to become: who was the main character of America's bestselling book in 2016?

     By making this change, the question also became more difficult because students had to look into both fiction and nonfiction bestseller lists since each type of books could have characters.  They also had to conduct deeper inquiry to determine who the main character of that work was.

     Adjusting questions this way reinforces the research skills I want to cultivate in my students.  Through the process of locating the answer, students are building reading stamina.  Students sometimes have to look at multiple websites and go beyond just reading the "abstract" on their initial search.  By doing this, they are building reading and research stamina that will help them to engage in more complex texts.

     Instead of just typing in the question and locating the answer, I encourage the students to "cut the question like a steak."  What I mean by this is to cut off the "bones and fat" (the unnecessary words) which develops their skills at identifying keywords to narrow their search and further limits their search results.  My goal is that my students will be so familiar and comfortable with "cutting the question like a steak" that they will transfer this skills to attack the research questions which are posed in their classes in this manner.

The Future of Google a Week

      In the future, I would like to grow the Google A Week program to include more faculty participation.  Historically we have a few teachers and staff members enter the weekly contest.  I think it would encourage more students to participate if they felt like they were competing against their teachers!

     Another way I would like to grow the program is to further integrate it with database use.  Not only would it give students more experience using the databases in the contest, but I also think this would go a long way to reinforcing the use of databases as students' "go to" research resource for projects in their classes.  It might require a bit more work to develop questions that could only be answered using our state funded databases, but the long term impact might make it work it.

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Is School Hard Enough?

    My wife is currently in graduate school to become an instructional facilitator.  As she has pursued her studies, we have had great conversations about instructional technology.  I have also come across several "hey honey, you really need to read this" texts from her coursework.  One of the most intriguing is a book called Mindset by Carol Dweck.

    If you are not familiar with Mindset, it is a fascinating work about how we mentally frame what we are capable of accomplishing.  Typically, people either fall into one of two categories: fixed mindset-i.e. my abilities are fixed and my life challenges can profoundly limit my capabilities, or a growth mindset: my abilities are not fixed and the sky is the limit for what I might do with those abilities.
I recently saw the growth mindset at work in this year's Google A Week Championships, or G.A.W.Cha (Gotcha).

     Two years ago I attended the Google Conference in Conway, Arkansas.  One of the ideas that was shared there was a Google A Week contest.  Since returning from that conference, I have held a Google A Week Contest for my students.In this contest, a question is posted in the library each week and on the school wide video broadcast for students to develop their research skills.  Often these questions come from current events and require students to research a question using Google, locate the correct answer and the web address where it came from, and turn in the fruits of their research on a piece of paper.    Each Friday right before I go home for the weekend, I sort through student answers and randomly select one of the students who submitted a correct response to win a chocolate bar.

     This is the second year in a row that we have hosted the Google A Week Championship (or G.A.W. Cha-Gotcha) in the library near the end of the school year.  There is an open invitation for any of the Google A Week Contest winners to come in at lunch and compete against the other winners to be the overall Google Champion at Lakeside.  Last year, I selected about 5 pretty challenging questions and about 10 students participated.

     This spring, I heard about a way to combine multiple Google Apps for Education from my colleague Brooke Higgins.  She mentioned learning about this on a technology podcast that I never did locate that had a presenter from Australia. (Sorry, Brooke :) )   I decided to try out this Multiple Google App approach for this year's Google A Week Championships.

     To accomplish this, I created a series of questions where students had to identify a landmark or location on Google Earth and then conduct further research with the Google Search engine to find the answers. I hooked up a laptop with Google Earth on it to each of the 7 screens in the library and gave the students a Chromebook with which to complete further research and submit their answers.

     This opportunity was better attended then last year as we had 13 participants.  With some help from my assistant, about 30 students were recruited to watch the Championships during both lunches.

     In a word, this year's Google A Week Championships were fascinating to watch.  They were fascinating because of the diversty of student participants.  There were students whose schedules are filled with advanced courses, average students, as well as ESOL learners and one student from the self contained special education classroom.

    Another point of fascination was the way students worked to answer the questions.  It was silent and they were all completely focused.  In fact, they were so focused, that when the bell rang for the end of lunch, no one moved!  Finally, after about 10 minutes, I told the student partcipants that they would have 5 more minutes and then I would write them a pass on to their next class.

    At one point during the contest, one of the spectators got up and asked me if he could join in because as he put it:  "it looks hard."   That's right, it was of interest to him because it looked difficult! So I gave him the opportunity to participate.

     My experiences and the feedback I got from students during G.A.W. Cha this year got me thinking about what changes we may need to make to the types of extension activities we plan for our students.  I am not advocating that as teachers we need to add extensions in the form of supplemental problems, or paragraphs-that is simply not very motivating.

     What if instead we planned more activities that were both very challenging, and motivating at the same time?  Admittedly, the questions in this year's G.A.W. Cha were hard; and maybe too difficult. (the highest overall student score was 7/10)  But inspite of that, not one student complained that it was too hard or made excuses and no one gave up.  As I mentioned before, a spectator actually asked to join up for that very reason-it looked like a difficult task, so they were motivated to try.

     The level of difficulty did not stop the students in the Championships from getting into such a flow with the activity that when the bell rang, they did not want to leave!  Instead it inspired them.
   
     What if we started with this question for developing extension/enrichment activities:  how can I inspire my students to want to learn/do more with their learning through this activity/experience?  I believe that would go a long way to fostering a growth mindset in our students, give them more, deep learning experiences with our curriculum and push their desire to become lifelong learners to the next level.

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