Gooru

Our assignment this week included creating a "how to" guide for a website dedicated to organizing your online life. My assigned website was Gooru. The purpose of Gooru is to allow teachers to gather resources and materials into a customizable playlist that is called a "Collection." These collections could be used as a way to enhance lessons, share extra materials with your students, find new resources to help you better understand how to approach teaching a subject, or building an online unit for students to complete. Not knowing anything about Gooru at the beginning of this assignment, I found it extremely user friendly! 

Gooru has four main pages that serve with the following functions:

• Discover: This is the place where you can search to find the best educational stuff on the web to use in your Collection. The discover page allows you to preview, learn and see what standards (Common Core or California) the resources align with. You can also narrow your search in filtering by category, grade, subject, website, or Common Core standard.
• Organize: This page allows you to organize your collections. Once you find a resource you would like to use, you can add it to your collection, as well as put comments on how you want students to use the resource or what they should make sure to pay attention to.
• Teach: The teach page is where you create the classpage that your students will use to navigate through the website. This is where you add assignments and share with your students the resources you have found.
• Study: The section is for the students to be able to access their class materials. By entering their code Class Code, that you as a teacher provide, they will be able to see and use the resources

Throughout my use with Gooru, I realized how helpful it would be in organizing concepts. However, when trying to come up with a “Collection” that would somehow relate to my future classroom as a Spanish teacher was difficult. The website seems to be more directed towards science, math, and history than anything else. In order do something related to Spanish, I would have to focus on world history of Spanish speaking regions or something of that sort.

The other thought that kept crossing my mind is that although you could build a unit devoted to something and essentially hit upon many standards, is it beneficial to have students working this way? I would think this is where my skepticism of using technology in the classroom comes into play. I think this is an excellent tool; however, I would be very cautious in not making a unit strictly done through this website. I do believe it is a great place to share with students extra resources (for those that may be really interested in a topic) as well as to assign homework.

Another positive use for this website would be to help differentiate to “gifted” or “talented” students. In our Educational Psychology class we talked about how there are two ways to differentiate instruction for these students: acceleration (giving the students the same material but more quickly so that they are able to do independent work afterwards) and enrichment (students work at the same pace as the class, but are able to delve more deeply into a topic). I think using a website like this, could help teachers whether they use the acceleration or enrichment instruction in order to benefit the students who need this type of differentiation.