Being a long time Microsoft Word user, I have come around on seeing the advantages of using Google Docs, especially for my students. Overall I feel that Google Docs is very user friendly.
This past school year I felt that my 4th grade students got into a pretty good groove of using their district Google accounts. As a class, we got in the habit of using Google Docs for many of our 'published' writing assignments and bigger projects (biography reports and The Great Brain). The students found Docs to be easy to work with, especially with not having to worry about saving their work, and the ease of being able to put images on their documents. One thing that I really love about my students using Google Docs is their ability to share their documents with me, so I can help them make revisions in their work. This upcoming school year I want to use the 'comment' feature more with my students. I think that it will be very helpful for them during the revision process if they know exactly what to revise based off my comments. I look forward to continue to using Google Docs with my students moving forward.
I would say that Google Slides is one of my favorite Google apps. I have used both Powerpoint and Keynote in the past, and have had my students use it for our Great Brain project too. I find that Google Slides is easier to use then both of the other programs. For example, my students loved learning that inserting images and video clips into a slide presentation is a simple one or two step process. My students' parents were blown away at how 'professional' their child's Google Slides presentations looked for their Great Brain presentations. I will definitely look to find more opportunities to create Slide presentations for my students, as well as find more ways for my students to use Google Slides throughout the year.
Google Calendar is fairly new to me. I had fun 'playing' with it, and saw that it is not too difficult to add and edit events. I think that it can be a valuable tool to use with both my colleagues, and parents/students as I grow more comfortable using it. I think that I can start by exploring it more this summer by filling in my own summer events, and then work to use it this upcoming school year. I can see myself creating calendars for both our class Biography project, as well as our Great Brain project.
I would create one calendar for your class, less confusing for your students. You can color code events and have each project be a different color. Personally, I couldn't live without Google Calendar.
ReplyDeleteWith Google Slides, you should check out the latest feature, Q and A - https://docs.googleblog.com/2016/05/slidesQA.html
I really agree with you on the Docs! This past school year, I used Schoology a lot because I liked how it had the ability to leave a comment. It made it so much easier to track what I'd said to kids (remember the good ol' days of writing comments on paper post-it notes?!), and that helped keep the kids on track and progressing nicely.
ReplyDeleteIn Schoology the organization is done for me. All the kids' work is in the assignment that I've made. Does anyone know how to organize Drive in a way like this so that everything is easy to find? That's my only concern with Drive. I can never seem to keep it organized!
Megan- With Drive, you can create folders for different subjects and then share the folders. Anything in a folder has the same sharing privileges as the folder itself. The thing about organizing drive though, is that you don't really need to organize it. Learning how to use the Google search for drive more efficiently is a time saver. The search feature in drive scans for specific types of files- docs, sheets, forms, who owns the doc you are looking for, and can scan for a specific word in the document, not just the title.
ReplyDeleteErik- a great tool to teach your students while using google docs for research is the research tool- Here's a short video- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iA0GcOIugJM