Level 2 Google Certified Educator

🎉 Whoo hoo!  I passed!  I am now officially a Level 2 Google Certified Educator! 🎉

So, originally after passing my Level 1 exam in February, I began studying and gearing up to take the Level 2 exam in April on my spring break.  But thanks to the COVID-19 pandemic 😒 my plans got put on the back-burner as homeschooling my three kids while trying to work full time for my district became top priority from the end of March through June!  

This time period was seriously insane (as I'm sure you all can relate)!  

I actually worked through my spring break helping to prepare distance learning webinars for our teachers for the week after spring break.  Prior to that, our Professional Development team and our EdTech Team (which consists of myself, my partner Terri Patterson and our admin Derek Rouch @derekrouch) scrambled to put together distance learning resource packets and a website (hemetlearnstogether.org) for students and parents to access instructional materials from home.  We also wrapped up our CTI coaching with a digital colloquium and then spent the last portion of the school year figuring out what next year's teacher professional development would look like without really knowing what to expect going into the school-year given the pandemic situation.  

The first two weeks of my "summer break" I worked part time to put the finishing touches on our ELA grades 6-10 curriculum scope & sequence, began transferring the content of our ELA PowerSchool page to a Google Site, and worked to clean up the standards alignment of our district's new Digital Wellness Scope & Sequence (coming soon to Hemet Unified teachers).  I also finally began to have some head-space to begin preparing for the Level 2 exam. 🤓

To prepare for the Level 2 Exam, I worked through the training materials and prep questions in the Google for Education Level 2 Advanced Training and practiced the sample questions.  I also watched this playlist of tutorial videos on the Teachings in Education YouTube Channel.  Lastly, this quiz on Quizizz was helpful as well.  

I also found it very valuable to be a part of this FaceBook group - Google Educators (Certification & Support) - of other educators who are certified or working on getting certified.  I was able to search for posts about the Level 2 exam and read about the experiences that others had when taking the test.  This is where I learned about that YouTube playlist and the quiz on Quizizz that I mentioned above!  I also found this group to be very supportive when I encountered some glitchiness (is that a word?) at the end of my exam.

When I took my Level 1 test in February,  I had my results within about 15 minutes.  However, that was not the case this go around.  I took the exam on Wednesday morning and finished around lunchtime.  When I hit the submit button, I kept getting an error message that said something along the lines of "the network connection was lost - reload".  So, I hit "reload" and got the same message.  This happened several times, so I logged out and when I tried to log back in, the system would not allow me to and notified me that my password had expired within the hour. 😩 So, I checked the system, and this is what I saw...

😧Before I completely panicked, I went to the Google Educator Facebook group that I mentioned above, and posted about what had just happened, and several other people commented that they had experienced the same thing.  Some that had experienced this situation the week prior were able to assure those of us who were having mini-panic attacks that our exam was saved and that we should get our results within a few days.  By Friday morning I was able to see a "PASS" in the system, and by Saturday evening, I received the congratulatory email from Google with my Level 2 certificate and badge!

  

So, for my teacher friends who are already certified in Level 1 and have been thinking about going for Level 2, DO IT!  

If I can do it, you can do it! 

The exam is multiple choice and scenario/performance task-based just like Level 1.  It covers advanced features of the following:  Google Drive, Gmail, Groups, Calendar (Appointment Slots & Meet), Sites, Blogger, Docs (Hyperdocs), Sheets, (Pivot Tables & Conditional Formatting), Slides, Forms (Sections & Quiz), Drawings, YouTube (Playlists & Live), Add-ons & Chrome Extensions, Maps & Earth, Hangouts/Meet, Expeditions, Scholar, Translate, the Explore tool, advanced searching, and Keep.  I was able to finish the multiple-choice questions in about 30 minutes.  I spent about an hour and 45 minutes on the performance tasks. And about 5 minutes reviewing a couple of questions that I had marked for review.  That's pretty much all I can tell you about the exam as I signed an NDA that I would not reveal the specific exam content.😶

Please reach out to me if you would like to chat more specifically about how you can prepare yourself for the Google Level 1 or 2 exams.

In the meantime, I'll be continuing to work on my Leading Edge Certification and contemplating whether or not I want attempt to become a Google Certified Trainer!  

Should I do it?