Thursday, August 6, 2015

Activity 4: Google Suite


I created this slide to welcome my students into class on our first day of school. I am familiar with Google Slides, so this was not a challenge, but something good to get checked off my long to do list for the beginning of the year. I want to give my students an idea of how to get into their daily routine from the second they walk into the room.

First Day of School Welcome and To Do Slide


I use Google Drive constantly in my teaching practice. It has become a staple for me. I create documents, slideshows, spreadsheets for organizing and analyzing data, quizzes, among other things. I also have students create those things as well and share it with me or others in their group. We comment to provide timely and ongoing feedback to improve what they are doing. Students work at school and at home on presentations, now making it easier so they don't need to get together. Instead, they choose a time to go online and meet on the same document or slide and work together while keeping up commentary as they go. I have seen such wonderful improvements in collaboration between my collegues and I, as well as among my students. I am excited to continue to develop this more.

One barrier I have found with cloud sharing is that some 4th grade students get mad at their fellow group members and sabotage projects. They delete what others have worked very hard on. Fortunately, I just learned that you can go back to see previous revisions and see who did what, reverting back to a previous version if needed. I wish I knew that last year when my students were in tears from their project being ruined from a crabby group member after hours of hard work! In the future, this will be a wonderful resource.
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1 comment:

  1. RyanAugust 19, 2015 at 2:06 PM

    I like both of the artifacts that you posted. Having a parent and student checklist for PIN is a great idea.

    I have found a consistent increase in collaboration when talking to teachers that use Google Drive frequently and have their students share documents with each other. That same confidence that we equate with the negativity of online bullying where people say things online that they would never say in person can also have a positive in the willingness of students to give each other feedback when they would often make trivial comments like "it looks good" if they were doing it face to face.

    I am glad that you learned how to utilize revision history within Google tools. I have had to use that feature multiple times myself. I don't know what the repercussions were for the student who chose to delete a group project but I think it is important that it would be the same as if they tore up someone else's assignment before it was turned in. I also think this would be a time to discuss with the student cyberbullying and the school policy against bullying. Students often don't identify these types of things as bullying and they need to recognize what their actions really are. In that discussion you can also work to identify what actions lead up to this students project destruction because their might have been other issues that lead to this final action. (off my soapbox)

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