Two weeks ago I gave the opening keynote at WLMA 2013 in Yakima, WA. During my keynote I mentioned the term “Google Jockey.” It got a laugh when I described the “Google Jockey” as the student who seems to Google everything anyone says. You can leverage that student’s habit into a force for good in your classroom.

I first discovered the term Google Jockey when I read Curtis Bonk’s The World Is Open: How Web Technology Is Revolutionizing Education. In The World Is Open I came across the idea for having a “Google Jockey” in my classroom. The idea is that you have one or two students in the room who are responsible for looking up terms or phrases that come up during the course of classroom discussion. Combining the use of a back channel along with a Google Jockey could become a good avenue for drilling deeper into the content of the day’s lesson.